"The climate system is particularly challenging since it is known that components in the system are inherently chaotic;
there are feedbacks that could potentially switch sign,
and there are central processes that affect the system in a complicated, non-linear manner.
These complex, chaotic, non-linear dynamics are an inherent aspect of the climate system."

"The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.
Rather the focus must be upon the prediction of the probability distribution of the system's future possible states
by the generation of ensembles of model solutions.
Addressing adequately the statistical nature of climate is computationally intensive and requires the application of new methods of model diagnosis,
but such statistical information is essential."

The Earth's climate system is highly nonlinear: inputs and outputs are not proportional, change is often episodic and abrupt,
rather than slow and gradual, and multiple equilibria are the norm.
While this is widely accepted, there is a relatively poor understanding of the different types of nonlinearities,
how they manifest under various conditions, and whether they reflect a climate system driven by astronomical forcings,
by internal feedbacks, or by a combination of both.
In this paper, after a brief tutorial on the basics of climate nonlinearity,
we provide a number of illustrative examples and highlight key mechanisms that give rise to nonlinear behavior,
address scale and methodological issues,
suggest a robust alternative to prediction that is based on using integrated assessments within the framework of vulnerability studies and,
lastly, recommend a number of research priorities and the establishment of education programs in Earth Systems Science.
It is imperative that the Earth's climate system research community embraces this nonlinear paradigm
if we are to move forward in the assessment of the human influence on climate.

Climate is long-range weather, it is a description of the average or prevailing weather in each season along the years.
The climate varies widely among different regions on Earth. Also, in some regions it varies more or less widely with the seasons.

Predicting the weather for a particular region, even for a few days in advance, is one of the most complex problems in science.
One basis for these predictions is that dayly weather changes slowly,
so tomorrow's weather will be similar to today's weather and so on (but with less certainty the further we go on,
because the weather is mathematically chaotic).
Also, that weather tends to repeat seasonally, for each region, changing with the years, sometimes abruptly.

The most obvious local cycle in the weather pattern is diurnal, basically controlled by the Sun.
The warmest time of the day is usually after noon, after receiving the highest energy influx.
The coldest is usually before dawn, after cooling all night.

The second cycle in importance is yearly, also controlled by the amount of energy received from the Sun.
The warmest days occur in the summer and the coldest in the winter,
when one hemisphere is tilted towards the Sun while the other is tilted away.
The axis of the Earth is currently tilted 23.5° in respect to its orbital plane.
The northern hemisphere contains most of the land, the southern hemisphere contains most of the ocean.

The Moist Tropical Climate of the Caribbean:

The Trade Winds from the Northeast are dominant in the climate of the Caribbean,
they are weaker and variable during the Northern Hemisphere Summer, in July, August and September.

The Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) is an area of low atmospheric pressure
that forms where the Northeastern Trade Winds meet with those from the Southeast, near the Equator.
When these winds converge, the warm and moist air is forced to rise.
This causes the water vapor it contains to condense as the air rises and cools,
resulting in a band of strong precipitation around the globe.
Precipitations in the ITCZ show a dairy cycle:
The clouds form late in the morning and early in the afternoon, and between 3 and 4 PM, the warmest hours of the day,
the storms form and the precipitations start.
This band moves with the seasons of the year, always attracted to the areas of higher intensity of Solar heating,
with grater surface temperatures.
It moves towards the Southern Hemisphere from September to February
and changes direction in April, May and June, before the Northern Hemisphere Summer.
The ITCZ is always to the Southeast of Venezuelan territory,
but is nearer and affects it during the Northern Hemisphere Summer.
The ITCZ is less mobile over the oceanic longitudes.
The variation in the location of the ITCZ dramatically affects the precipitations in the equatorial regions,
resulting in a humid season (from May to November) and a dry one (from December to April)
between the Tropics of Cancer (23.5° N) and Capricorn (23.5° S), instead of the cold and warm of higher latitudes (Temperate Climates).

Tropical moist climates extend northward and southward from the equator to about 15° to 25° of latitude.
In these climates all months have average temperatures greater than 18° Celsius (64°F). Annual precipitation is greater than 1,500 mm.

South Florida is the only region in the continental U.S. that has a Moist Tropical Climate.
The Moist Tropical Climate of southern Florida borders the Moist Subtropical Mid-Latitude Climate of central and northern Florida.
This Subtropical climate generally has hot muggy summers and frequent thunderstorms, with mild winters.
Its extent is from 30° to 50° of latitude, mainly on the eastern and western borders of most continents.

The border between the Florida Tropical and Subtropical climates, according to Wladimir Köppen (1918)
is a line from Vero Beach to the South of Lake Okeechobee, to Fort Myers, to Punta Gorda, to Tarpon Springs.

Southern Florida is a Tropical Savannah, dominated by the Everglades. It shows pronounced, alternaing, wet and dry seasons.
During the rainy season, from May to October, southern Florida shows frequently cloudy skies, high humidity and warmer temperatures.
During the dry season, from November to April, southern Florida shows frequently clear skies, low humidity and colder temperatures.
There is a narrow coastal transitional strip from near Fort Pierce to Miami with a shorter dry season.

In Southern Florida the winds normally come from the East all year long.
These winds tend to block cold air intrusions from the north.
All months have average temperatures greater than 18° Celsius (64°F). Annual precipitation is greater than 1,500 mm.
The temperature variations are kept very small by the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.

Atmospheric Circulation:

ITCZ, Pressure and Wind at Sea Level:

The Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) is identified on the figures by a red line.
The formation of this band of low pressure is the result of solar heating and the convergence of the trade winds.
In January, the intertropical convergence zone is found south of the equator.
During this time period, the Southern Hemisphere is tilted towards the Sun and receives higher inputs of shortwave radiation.
Note that the line representing the intertropical convergence zone is not straight and parallel to the lines of latitude.
Bends in the line occur because of the different heating characteristics of land and water.
Over the continents of Africa, South America, and Australia, these bends are toward the South Pole.
This phenomenon occurs because land heats up faster than ocean.

The graphics show the center of the ITCZ (red line) and the atmospheric pressure (colors),
velocity and direction at sea level (black arrows), in January and July (1959-1997 average).

During July, the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) is generally found north of the equator.
This shift in position occurs because the altitude of the Sun is now higher in the Northern Hemisphere.
The greatest spatial shift in the ITCZ, from January to July, occurs in the eastern half of the image.
This shift is about 40° of latitude in some places.
The more intense July Sun causes land areas of Northern Africa and Asia rapidly warm creating the Asiatic Low
which becomes part of the ITCZ.
In the winter months,
the intertropical convergence zone is pushed south by the development of an intense high pressure system over central Asia.
The extreme movement of the ITCZ in this part of the world also helps to intensify the development
of a regional winds system called the Asian Monsoon.

Beginning June 1, 2011, the Tropical Analysis and Forecast Branch (TAFB) will officially include,
as part of its portion of the unified surface analyses (USA),
a distinction between the trade wind Intertropical Convergence Zone (hereafter ITCZ)
and the monsoon trough ITCZ (hereafter monsoon trough).
A second addition to the TAFB portion of the USA will be the depiction of shear lines.

Depiction of the Monsoon Trough on the Tropical Analysis & Forecast Branch (TAFB) portion of the Unified Surface Analysis

The decision to differentiate between the ITCZ and monsoon trough arises from the differences in wind direction
and its implication for the tropical cyclogenesis for each feature.
TAFB's definition of each feature follows:

Monsoon Trough - the portion of the ITCZ which extends into or through a monsoon circulation,
as depicted by a line on a weather map showing the location of minimum sea level pressure.
This line coincides with the maximum cyclonic curvature vorticity,
with southwesterly (SW) monsoonal flow prevailing south of the trough axis.

Implication for users of the TAFB surface analysis: users may anticipate SW winds to the south of the monsoon trough,
and SE winds to the south of the ITCZ.

Implication for tropical cyclogenesis: the convergence of SW winds south of the monsoon trough and NE winds north of the monsoon trough
creates a background flow that produces cyclonic vorticity, which is important for tropical cyclogenesis.
The ITCZ creates a confluence zone of NE trade wind flow and SE trade wind flow, which does not readily create cyclonic vorticity.
Thus, tropical cyclogenesis is more likely in a background flow associated with a monsoon trough than the ITCZ.

The Troposphere is the lowest layer of the atmosphere, from the ground to the tropopause.
It goes from some 20 Km in the equatorial regions to near 7 Km at the poles when in winter.
In the temperate zones of the Earth it averages some 17 Km.
In the troposphere are 80% of the mass and 99% of the water vapor and particles of the atmosphere.
Tropos means change in Greek; in the troposphere is where most of the weather occurs.
The composition of the atmosphere is very uniform but for the water, vapor and ice distribution.
All this water is evaporated at the surface of continents and oceans.
The tropopause is the boundary region between the troposphere and the stratosphere.
There is little mixing between these two layers.
In the troposphere layer temperature decreases with altitude (positive lapse rate, usually 6°C/Km),
from an average of 15°C at sea level to about -55°C at the top of the tropopause.
In the stratosphere layer the temperature at first remains near constant, then increases with altitude (negative lapse rate),
this defines the height of the tropopause.

The standard ground atmospheric pressure at the equator (1,013.25 hPa = 760 mmHg) results from the weight of the air above.
Local pressure decreases with temperature, elevation and latitude. Local pressure increases with humidity in the air above.
Low local pressures are normally associated with faster winds, clouds, precipitation and storms.
High local pressures are normally associated with dry weather and mostly clear skies, with larger diurnal temperature changes and light winds.

The seasonal/annual cycle, forced by the annual cycle of the Sun due to the rotation of the Earth about the Sun.

Interannual or year-to-year variability, such as El Niño.

Accurate forecasting of this variability will benefit people living in the tropical regions,
and also over the rest of the Earth due to remote 'teleconnections'
between the weather in the tropics and the weather elsewhere around the globe.
Here, we focus on variability on the intraseasonal time scale, which is dominated by the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO).
This was discovered by Madden and Julian (1971, 1972) who called it the '40-50-day oscillation' because of its preferred time scale.
Since then it has been called the '30-60-day oscillation' and the 'intraseasonal oscillation',
but the term 'MJO' has now emerged as a favorite.

The MJO is characterized by an eastward propagation of rainfall over the 'warm pool' region from the Indian Ocean to the western Pacific.

In addition to strongly modulating the rainfall in the tropics, the MJO has a signal in other meteorological variables.
For example, a clear MJO cycle in sea level pressure can also be seen.

The negative pressure anomalies appear to emanate out of the region of enhanced rainfall.
One signal propagates eastward along the equator. This is an equatorial Kelvin wave.
When it reaches the Andes mountain range along the eastern coast of the Pacific it is momentarily blocked,
before continuing on eastward across the Atlantic, completing a circuit of the equator in one MJO cycle, about 48 days.

An equatorial Rossby wave signal is also forced by the MJO rainfall anomalies.
This can be seen as a pair of negative sea level pressure anomalies, one either side of the equator,
that lie slightly to the west of the enhanced rainfall.

In the 'other half' of the MJO cycle,
the reduced rainfall triggers equatorial Kelvin and Rossby waves of the opposite sign (positive sea level pressure anomalies).

The MJO also affects other meteorological systems in the tropics:

Monsoons. The MJO modulates the active/break cycles that occur within the Asian and West African monsoons.

The Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) is a tropical weather system that lasts about 1 to 2 months.
It is one of the few aspects of the weather that can be skilfully predicted beyond about 2 weeks into the future.

The Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) is an ongoing series of long-duration changes
in the sea surface temperature of the North Atlantic Ocean,
with cool and warm phases that may last for 20-40 years at a time and a difference of about 1°F [0.56°C] between extremes.
These changes are natural and have been occurring for at least the last 1,000 years.

Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) Index 1856 to January 23, 2016. Averaged January to December

Is the AMO a natural phenomenon, or is it related to global warming?
Instruments have observed AMO cycles only for the last 150 years, not long enough to conclusively answer this question.
However, studies of paleoclimate proxies, such as tree rings and ice cores,
have shown that oscillations similar to those observed instrumentally have been occurring for at least the last millennium.
This is clearly longer than modern man has been affecting climate, so the AMO is probably a natural climate oscillation.
In the 20th century, the climate swings of the AMO have alternately camouflaged and exaggerated the effects of global warming,
and made attribution of global warming more difficult to ascertain.

The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation is a recently discovered mode of Sea Surface Temperature variability
for a significant portion of the global oceans.
Climate studies provide different causes for the additional strength of the changes in North Atlantic SST anomalies:
some blame the Atlantic branch of Thermohaline Circulation,
while another discusses the multiple interactions between Saharan dust, Sahel precipitation, solar radiation,
and Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature.
While cause may be debatable, its impact on Northern Hemisphere sea surface and land surface temperature is clear.

Foltz and McPhaden (2008) write in their Abstract,
"Trends in tropical Atlantic sea surface temperature (SST), Sahel rainfall, and Saharan dust are investigated during 1980-2006.
This period is characterized by a significant increase in tropical North Atlantic SST
and the transition from a negative to a positive phase of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO).
It is found that dust concentrations over western Africa and the tropical North Atlantic Ocean
decreased significantly between 1980 and 2006 in association with an increase in Sahel rainfall.
The decrease in dust in the tropical North Atlantic tended to increase the surface radiative heat flux by 0.7 W/m^2 which, if unbalanced,
would lead to an increase in SST of 3 deg C.
Coupled models significantly underestimate the amplitude of the AMO in the tropical North Atlantic
possibly because they do not account for changes in Saharan dust concentration."

El Niño and La Niña are natural oscillations of the ocean-atmosphere system in the tropical Pacific
that have important consequences for weather around the globe.
Current science can detect them, but not predict them in the long term.
They are part of a phenomenon known as El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO),
a continual but irregular cycle (of about 3 to 7 years) of shifts in ocean and atmospheric conditions that affect the global climate.
El Niño is characterized by unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific,
as opposed to La Niña, which is characterized by unusually cold ocean temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific.
Among these consequences is increased rainfall across the southern tier of the US and in Peru, which has caused destructive flooding,
and drought in the West Pacific, sometimes associated with devastating brush fires in Australia.
El Niño events tend to suppress Atlantic hurricane activity, while La Niña events tend to enhance it.

The recent change from stronger El Nino to stronger La Nina conditions is revealed in monthly Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI) data since 1950
... which is also related to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO),
some researchers consider the PDO to be a low-frequency modulation of El Nino and La Nina activity.

Of significance to the current 'global warming hiatus' issue is the observation that we might have now entered
into a new La Niña-dominant phase.
... such a scenario could well lead to a 25- or 30-year period of no warming - or even cooling - just as was experienced up until the 1970s.

"The Southern Oscillation was discovered decades before it was found to be related to El Niño and La Niña events,
which are not repetitive in time, so they are not parts of a true oscillation.
While there are portions of El Niño and La Niña processes that behave as cycles, those cycles break down,
and an El Niño or a La Niña can evolve as an independent event.
Further, El Niño and La Niña are not opposites.
That's also very obvious in the sea surface temperature records.
La Niña is an exaggeration of the normal state of the tropical Pacific, while an El Niño is the anomalous phase.
That's why many researchers believe there are only two states of the tropical Pacific: El Niño and 'other'.
Also, over the last 30 years it's rare when a La Niña has been as strong as the El Niño that preceded it.
How then could a La Niña counteract an El Niño?
Of course, the temperature records also show a multidecadal period when La Niña were as strong as El Niño,
and it's no coincidence that global surface temperature did not warm during it."

"A very strong El Niño like the one in 1997/98
is capable of temporarily raising global surface temperatures more than 0.4 deg C (about 0.7 deg F) over a 12-month period,
and for some reason, many climate scientists claim such an event has no long-term aftereffects.
This means those scientists have failed to account for the warm water that is redistributed after a strong El Niño
and for the effects those leftover warm waters have on global climate."

"An El Niño and his sibling La Niña can cause flooding in some parts of the world,
droughts in others - blizzards in some areas, record low snowfalls elsewhere.
The strong storms they produce erode coastlines.
They can suppress the development of tropical cyclones (hurricanes) in some parts of the globe
and enhance the conditions for their development in others.
It should go without saying that they cause heat waves and cold spells depending on the season and location.
These causes and effects have been known for decades.
Recently, however, a few headline-seizing climate scientists, with the help of mainstream media and blogs,
have now redirected the blame for those weather events to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases."

"The IPCC uses climate model simulations of global surface temperatures
with and without radiative forcings from manmade greenhouse gases
to show that the warming of global surface temperatures for the past three decades
could only be simulated by the models that included anthropogenic greenhouse gases.
For the IPCC, this provided irrefutable proof that greenhouse gases were responsible for the warming.
To the general public, however, it suggested another possibility.
If climate models without radiative forcings from greenhouse gas couldn't simulate the warming,
then those assumption-based climate models might be seriously flawed.
This book, using the outputs of the climate models used by the IPCC, confirms that they are in fact flawed.
Climate models show no skill whatsoever at being able to simulate the ocean processes
that produced the warming of global sea surface temperatures for the past 3 decades."

"Maybe the IPCC should examine the sea surface temperature records for the past 30 years.
Why? They do not agree with the IPCC's conclusions.
Satellite-based sea surface temperature records show
El Niño and La Niña are responsible for most of the warming of global sea surface temperatures over the past 3 decades.
That fact shows up plain as day in sea surface temperature records.
It's tough to miss. It really is. Maybe the IPCC has overlooked it intentionally."

"Who Turned on the Heat? uses observations-based data, not climate models,
to illustrate where and how ENSO is capable of raising global sea surface temperatures over periods of 10, 20, 30 years and more.
Because land surface air temperatures are basically along for the ride, mimicking the variations in sea surface temperatures,
ENSO can be said to be responsible for most of the warming of global land plus sea surface temperatures for the past three decades as well."

"El Niño and La Niña events are often described as the 'unusual' warming (El Niño) and cooling (La Niña)
of the surface of the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean.
They happen every couple of years, so there's really nothing unusual about them.
In fact, based on the NOAA's Oceanic NINO Index (ONI),
official El Niño and La Niña months occurred about 55% of the time since 1950.
Also, scientists who study historical changes in climate (paleoclimatologists)
have presented evidence that El Niño and La Niña events were occurring 3 to 5 million years ago.
In other words, not only do El Niño and La Niña events occur often, they've been around a long, long time."

"El Niño and La Niña are siblings, Mother Natures' mischievous but mighty children.
Contrary to popular beliefs, they do not counteract one another.
This is also plainly evident in sea surface temperature data.
Further, El Niño is usually more powerful than his sister.
On the other hand, La Niña can endure for as long as three years, while the stronger El Niño normally lasts for less than one year.
Look out, though, when they both decide to test themselves as strong events in sequence,
wrestling with global surface temperatures as a tag team.
Together they can cause global surface temperatures to shift upwards for a decade,
until they act together again as a team and cause another persistent change in surface temperatures around the globe.
This happens because of some not-so-subtle differences between La Niña and El Niño phases,
a fact that is very apparent once you understand those phases."

"The IPCC's climate models are allegedly used to determine the causes of the past warming and cooling of global surface temperatures,
and they are employed to project global surface temperatures into the future based on a number of assumptions.
Here's a simple but realistic way to look at the climate models:
Climate models show how surface temperatures would warm IF they were warmed by manmade greenhouse gases.
The truth is, the Earth's oceans do not respond to manmade greenhouse gases as the modelers have assumed.
The sea surface temperature records show
the global oceans could care less about a little back radiation from anthropogenic greenhouse gases.
While global sea surface temperatures have definitely warmed over the past 3 decades,
there is no indication that additional infrared radiation from increased concentrations of carbon dioxide caused the warming."

"Examples of climate model problems: Most of the climate models used by the IPCC in their 2007 4th Assessment Report (AR4),
in addition to the failings already discussed,
have multiple flaws with how they simulate the natural processes taking place in the tropical Pacific.
They have difficulties simulating precipitation, cloud cover, downward shortwave radiation, trade wind speeds and location, etc.,
which are all interrelated and associated with El Niño-Southern Oscillation.
Climate models tend to make La Niña events as strong as El Niño events,
while in the real world, starting in the late 1970s, El Niño events have tended to be stronger than La Niña events.
Recently, though, they've been working their way back to a regime when El Niño and La Niña are more equally weighted.
It is well known that El Niño and La Niña events are tied to the seasonal cycle with both phases peaking around December,
but this is not the case in all climate models."

"The sea surface temperature and ocean heat content data for the past 30 years show the global oceans have warmed.
There is no evidence, however, that the warming was caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases in part or in whole;
that is, the warming can be explained by natural ocean-atmosphere processes, primarily ENSO."

As you'll note from the Table of Contents, the book includes many of the model-data comparisons I published as blog posts over the past year.
The text accompanying them has been rewritten, expanded and edited for readability in this book.
And you'll note there are brand new presentations.

Climate Models Fail exposes the disturbing fact that climate models being used by the IPCC for their 5th Assessment Report
have very little practical value because they cannot simulate critical variables of interest to the public and policymakers.
Using easy-to-read graphs, this book compares data (surface temperature, precipitation, and sea ice area) with the computer model simulations.
It is very easy to see that the model outputs bear little relationship to the data.
In other words, climate models create imaginary climates in virtual worlds that exhibit no similarities to the climate of the world in which we live.

This book was prepared for readers without scientific backgrounds.
The terms used by scientists are explained and non-technical "translations" are provided.
Introductory sections present basics.
There are also numerous hyperlinks to additional background information.
The book is well illustrated, with more than 250 color-coded graphs and maps.
It is an excellent introduction to global warming and climate change for people who are not well-versed yet want to learn more.

Bob Tisdale - New Book: "On Global Warming and the Illusion of Control - Part 1":

On Global Warming and the Illusion of Control - Part 1 includes introductory discussions of 3 primary topics:

The science behind the groupthink of human-induced global warming and climate change,
climate models, and
even more importantly, many of the numerous known modes of natural variability.

Those fundamental presentations are in layperson terms, with links to more-detailed discussions and peer-reviewed papers.

When you first download the ebook, you'll note it's over 700 pages long.
Some of you are going to say to yourselves, I'll never read a 700-page book about global warming and climate change.
I'm not expecting that everyone will.
The next thing you might note is that the interactive Table of Contents lists more than 60 chapters.

Those of you who are new to global warming and climate change might want to start with:

Simply click on the titles of those chapters in the Table of Contents, and Adobe Acrobat Reader will fast-forward you there.

Since they're in the news, others of you might be interested in El Niño events, and are wondering about the processes behind them.
Simply click on Chapter 3.7 - Ocean Mode: El Niño and La Niña.

The Introduction covers a multitude of topics, from the slowdown in global warming to examples of very basic climate model failings;
from the political, not scientific, nature of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
to global warming ranking low on peoples' priorities around the globe.

Why am I giving away a 700+ page book that took me almost 2 years to write?
The primary reason: Free, it should have a much-greater circulation.
Another reason: This is my way of saying thanks to everyone who has offered constructive comments on the threads of my blog posts
at WattsUpWithThat?
and at my blog ClimateObservations.
This book could not have been written without your insights.
Of course, I'm also hoping that many readers will find the two links to my tip jar that are found in the text.

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) is a natural long-term temperature fluctuation of the Pacific Ocean.
The PDO waxes and wanes approximately every 20 to 30 years,
has a dominant impact on hurricane variability in the Pacific and is probably influenced by the ENSO.

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) is a long-lived El Niño-like pattern of Pacific climate variability.
While the two climate oscillations have similar spatial climate fingerprints, they have very different behavior in time.

Two main characteristics distinguish PDO from El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO):
first, 20th century PDO "events" persisted for 20-to-30 years, while typical ENSO events persisted for 6 to 18 months;
second, the climatic fingerprints of the PDO are most visible in the North Pacific/North American sector,
while secondary signatures exist in the tropics - the opposite is true for ENSO.

Several independent studies find evidence for just two full PDO cycles in the past century:
"cool" PDO regimes prevailed from 1890-1924 and again from 1947-1976,
while "warm" PDO regimes dominated from 1925-1946 and from 1977 through (at least) the mid-1990's.
A "cool" PDO regime has prevailed after 1998.

Global Warming as a Natural Response to Cloud Changes Associated with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO):

"A simple climate model forced by satellite-observed changes in the Earth's radiative budget associated with the Pacific Decadal Oscillation
is shown to mimic the major features of global average temperature change during the 20th Century
- including three-quarters of the warming trend.
A mostly-natural source of global warming is also consistent with mounting observational evidence
that the climate system is much less sensitive to carbon dioxide emissions than the IPCC's climate models simulate."

"The PDO index represents the spatial pattern of the sea surface temperature anomalies in the extratropical North Pacific (20° N - 65° N)
... not the sea surface temperature anomalies themselves.
A strong positive PDO index value indicates the sea surface temperature anomalies of the eastern extratropical North Pacific
are warmer than the western and central portions, which is a spatial pattern created by El Niño events.
On the other hand,
a strong negative PDO index value indicates the sea surface temperature anomalies of the western and central portions
of the extratropical North Pacific are warmer than the eastern portion, and that's a spatial pattern created by La Niña events."
[See Figure 1]

"A cooling of the sea surface temperature anomalies of the western-central portion of the North Pacific can cause the PDO index to increase,
and a warming of the sea surface temperatures of the eastern North Pacific can also cause the PDO index to increase."

"A La Niña event in the tropical Pacific typically creates a spatial pattern in the extratropical North Pacific
where it's cooler in the eastern portion than it is in the western and central portions."
"An El Niño event creates the opposite spatial pattern,
where it's warmer in the eastern extratropical North Pacific and cooler in the western and central portions,
and that also relates to a "warm" PDO spatial pattern."
[See Figure 2]

"It is often said that the PDO pattern is the dominant spatial pattern in the extratropical North Pacific,
and that makes sense because the PDO pattern represents the El Niño- and La Niña-like pattern in the extratropical North Pacific
... and ... El Niños and La Niñas are the dominant mode of natural variability for the global oceans."

"The PDO data are not sea surface temperature data of the North Pacific.
The PDO data, on the other hand, are determined from the sea surface temperature data there,
using a statistical analysis called Principal Component Analysis. Note the distinction."

"It may be easiest to think of the PDO data in another way -
as representing how closely the spatial pattern in the North Pacific at any point in time
matches the spatial pattern created by La Niña and El Niño events.
If the spatial pattern closely matches the La Niña pattern in Figure 2, then the PDO index value would be negative.
The closer the match in the spatial pattern to one created by La Niña events, the greater the negative value.
And the opposite holds true for the El Niño-related spatial pattern.
The closer the resemblance to the El Niño pattern, the greater the positive PDO index value."
"The map on the right in Figure 2
presents a classic cool PDO pattern, which would be represented by a negative PDO index value."

The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) Index is based on the surface sea-level pressure difference between the Subtropical (Azores) High
and the Subpolar Low.
The positive phase of the NAO reflects below-normal heights and pressure across the high latitudes of the North Atlantic
and above-normal heights and pressure over the central North Atlantic, the eastern United States and western Europe.
The negative phase reflects an opposite pattern of height and pressure anomalies over these regions.
Both phases of the NAO are associated with basin-wide changes in the intensity and location of the North Atlantic jet stream and storm track,
and in large-scale modulations of the normal patterns of zonal and meridional heat and moisture transport,
which in turn results in changes in temperature and precipitation patterns often extending from eastern North America to western and central Europe.

Strong positive phases of the NAO tend to be associated with above-normal temperatures in the eastern United States and across northern Europe
and below-normal temperatures in Greenland and oftentimes across southern Europe and the Middle East.
They are also associated with above-normal precipitation over northern Europe and Scandinavia
and below-normal precipitation over southern and central Europe.
Opposite patterns of temperature and precipitation anomalies are typically observed during strong negative phases of the NAO.
During particularly prolonged periods dominated by one particular phase of the NAO,
abnormal height and temperature patterns are also often seen extending well into central Russia and north-central Siberia.
The NAO exhibits considerable interseasonal and interannual variability,
and prolonged periods (several months) of both positive and negative phases of the pattern are common.

"Near the end of each calendar year ocean surface temperatures warm along the coasts of Ecuador and northern Peru.
Local residents referred to this seasonal warming as "El Niño",
meaning The Child, due to its appearance around the Christmas season.
Every two to seven years a much stronger warming appears,
which is often accompanied by beneficial rainfall in the arid coastal regions of these two countries.
Over time the term "El Niño" began to be used in reference to these major
warm episodes."

"Wetter than normal conditions during warm episodes are observed along the west coast of tropical South America,
and at subtropical latitudes of North America (Gulf Coast) and South America (southern Brazil to central Argentina)."

"At times ocean surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific are colder than normal.
These cold episodes,
sometimes referred to as "La Niña" episodes,
are characterized by lower than normal pressure over Indonesia and northern Australia
and higher than normal pressure over the eastern tropical Pacific.
This pressure pattern is associated with enhanced near-surface equatorial easterly winds over the central and eastern equatorial Pacific."

"Drier than normal conditions during cold episodes, are observed along the west coast of tropical South America,
and at subtropical latitudes of North America (Gulf Coast) and South America (southern Brazil to central Argentina)
during their respective winter seasons."

"During La Niña, rainfall and thunderstorm activity diminishes over the central equatorial Pacific,
and becomes confined to Indonesia and the western Pacific.
The area experiencing a reduction in rainfall generally coincides quite well with the area of abnormally cold ocean surface temperatures.
This overall pattern of rainfall departures spans nearly one-half the way around the globe,
and is responsible for many of the global weather impacts caused by La Niña."

"In the left-hand panel you can see the seasonal rainfall totals over the Pacific Ocean, the United States,
and South America during January-March 1989 when strong La Niña conditions were present.
The heaviest rainfall is shown by the darker green and blue colors, and lowest rainfall is shown by the lighter green colors.
The rainfall totals are shown in units of millimeters (mm).
Since 25.4 mm is equal to 1 inch of rain,
we see that the rainfall totals are more than 800 mm over the western tropical Pacific and Indonesia,
which is more than 31½ inches of rain."

"In the right-hand panel you can see the January-March 1989 seasonal rainfall departures from average for strong La Niña conditions.
The areas where the rainfall is well above average are shown by darker green colors,
and the areas where the rainfall is most below average are shown by the darker brown and yellow colors.
These rainfall departures are shown in units of 100 millimeters.
We see that rainfall totals were more than 200-400 mm above normal over the western tropical Pacific and Indonesia during the season,
which is roughly 8-16 inches above normal!
We also see well below-average rainfall across the central tropical Pacific,
where totals in some areas were more than 400 mm (15¾ inches) below normal."

La Niña:

El Niño:

"In the left-hand panel the seasonal rainfall totals during the strong El Niño conditions of January-March 1998
are shown for over the Pacific Ocean, the United States, and South America.
The heaviest rainfall [in units of millimeters (mm)] is shown by the darker green and blue colors,
and lowest rainfall is shown by the lighter green colors.
Since 25.4 mm is equal to one inch of rain, we see that the rainfall totals are more than 800 mm just south of the equator
along the International Date Line (indicated by the 180 label), which is more than 31½ inches of rain.
And nearly double the normal amount."

"In the right-hand panel the January-March 1998 seasonal rainfall departures from average are shown.
The areas with well above average rainfall are shown by darker green colors,
and the areas with well below-average rainfall are shown by the darker brown and yellow colors.
The rainfall departures are shown in units of 100 millimeters.
We see that the seasonal rainfall totals were more than 400 mm above normal just south of the equator
along the International Date Line (indicated by the 180 label), which is more than 15¾ inches above normal.
Considerable rainfall also occurred farther north (near 40°N) over the central and eastern North Pacific,
and across the western and southeastern United States.
These areas lie along the main wintertime storm track, which brings above-average rainfall to the western and southeastern United States."

"During El Niño, rainfall and thunderstorm activity diminishes over the western equatorial Pacific,
and increases over the eastern half of the tropical Pacific.
This area of increased rainfall occurs where the exceptionally warm ocean waters have reached about 28°C or 82°F.
This overall pattern of rainfall departures spans nearly one-half the distance around the globe,
and is responsible for many of the global weather impacts caused by El Niño."

"The climate models used by the IPCC for attribution studies and projections of future climate
cannot simulate the basic coupled ocean-atmosphere feedback in the tropical Pacific that underlies ENSO. It's called Bjerknes feedback.
It's the positive feedback relationship between the strength of the trade winds and the surface temperature gradient
(cooler in the east, warmer in the west) of the tropical Pacific.
Stronger trade winds yield a larger temperature gradient. And a larger temperature gradient yields stronger trade winds.
The two are interdependent, providing positive feedback to one another."

"Bjerknes feedback", very basically, means how the tropical Pacific and the atmosphere above it are coupled;
i.e., they are interdependent, a change in one causes a change in the other and they provide positive feedback to one another.
The existence of this positive "Bjerknes feedback" suggests that El Niño and La Niña events will remain locked in one mode
until something interrupts the positive feedback.

"El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the most important coupled ocean-atmosphere phenomenon
to cause global climate variability on interannual time scales.
Here we attempt to monitor ENSO by basing the Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI) on the six main observed variables over the tropical Pacific.
These six variables are: sea-level pressure, zonal and meridional components of the surface wind, sea surface temperature,
surface air temperature, and total cloudiness fraction of the sky."

For MEI values before 1950 see
ESRL-PSD: Extended Multivariate ENSO Index,
a simplified MEI.ext index that extends the MEI record back to 1871,
based on Hadley Centre sea-level pressure and sea surface temperatures, but combined in a similar fashion as the current MEI.

"A transition to ENSO-neutral is likely during late Northern Hemisphere spring or early summer 2016,
with a possible transition to La Niña conditions during the fall.
"Indicative of a strong El Niño, sea surface temperature (SSTs) anomalies
were in excess of 2°C across the east-central equatorial Pacific Ocean during January
(Fig. 1).
The Niño indices in the eastern Pacific declined, while Niño-3.4 and Niño-4 were nearly unchanged
(Fig. 2)".
See
ENSO Diagnostic Discussion - 11 February 2016.

"A strong El Niño is expected to gradually weaken through spring 2016,
and to transition to ENSO-neutral during late spring or early summer."
"A strong El Niño continued during December,
with well above-average sea surface temperatures (SSTs) across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean
(Fig. 1).
All weekly Niño indices decreased slightly from the previous month
(Fig. 2)".
See
ENSO Diagnostic Discussion - 14 January 2016.

"El Niño is expected to remain strong through the Northern Hemisphere winter 2015-16,
with a transition to ENSO-neutral anticipated during late spring or early summer 2016."
"A strong El Niño continued during November as indicated by well above-average sea surface temperatures (SSTs)
across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean
(Fig. 1).
The Niño-4, Niño-3.4 and Niño-3 indices rose to their highest levels so far during this event,
while the Niño-1+2 index remained approximately steady
(Fig. 2)".
See
ENSO Diagnostic Discussion - 10 December 2015.

"El Niño will likely peak during the Northern Hemisphere winter 2015-16,
with a transition to ENSO-neutral anticipated during the late spring or early summer 2016."
"A strong El Niño continued during October as indicated by well above-average sea surface temperatures (SSTs)
across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean
(Fig. 1).
Most Niño indices increased during the month, although the far eastern Niño-1+2 index decreased, accentuating the maximum in anomalous SST farther west
(Fig. 2)".
See
ENSO Diagnostic Discussion - 12 November 2015.

"There is an approximately 95% chance that El Niño will continue through Northern Hemisphere winter 2015-16,
gradually weakening through spring 2016."
"During September, sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies were well above average across the central and eastern Pacific Ocean
(Fig. 1).
The Niño indices generally increased, although the far western Niño-4 index was nearly unchanged
(Fig. 2)".
See
ENSO Diagnostic Discussion - 8 October 2015.

"There is an approximately 95% chance that El Niño will continue through Northern Hemisphere winter 2015-16,
gradually weakening through spring 2016."
"During August, sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies were near or greater than +2.0°C across the eastern half of the tropical Pacific
(Fig. 1).
SST anomalies increased in the Niño-3.4 and Niño 3-regions, were approximately unchanged in the Niño-4 region,
and decreased in the Niño-1+2 region
(Fig. 2)".
See
ENSO Diagnostic Discussion - 10 September 2015.

"There is a greater than 90% chance that El Niño will continue through Northern Hemisphere winter 2015-16,
and around an 85% chance it will last into early spring 2016."
"During July, sea surface temperatures (SST) anomalies were near +1.0°C in the central equatorial Pacific Ocean,
and in excess of +2.0°C across the eastern Pacific
(Fig. 1).
SST anomalies increased in the Niño-3 and Niño-3.4 regions,
while the Niño-4 and Niño-1+2 indices decreased slightly during the month
(Fig. 2)".
See
ENSO Diagnostic Discussion - 13 August 2015.

"There is a greater than 90% chance that El Niño will continue through Northern Hemisphere winter 2015-16,
and around an 80% chance it will last into early spring 2016."
"During June, sea surface temperatures (SST) anomalies exceeded +1.0°C across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean
(Fig. 1).
The largest SST anomaly increases occurred in the Niño-3 and Niño-3.4 regions,
while the Niño-4 and Niño-1+2 indices remained more constant through the month
(Fig. 2)".
See
ENSO Diagnostic Discussion - 9 July 2015.

"There is a greater than 90% chance that El Niño will continue through Northern Hemisphere fall 2015,
and around an 85% chance it will last through the 2015-16 winter."
"During May, sea surface temperatures (SST) anomalies increased across the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean
(Fig. 1
&
Fig. 2).
All of the Niño indices were in excess of +1.0°C, with the largest anomalies in the eastern Pacific,
indicated by recent weekly values of +1.4°C in Niño-3 and +1.9°C in Niño-1+2
(Fig. 2)."
See
ENSO Diagnostic Discussion - 11 June 2015.

"There is an approximately 90% chance that El Niño will continue through Northern Hemisphere summer 2015,
and a greater than 80% chance it will last through 2015."
"By early May 2015,
weak to moderate El Niño conditions were reflected by above-average sea surface temperatures (SST) across the equatorial Pacific
(Fig. 1),
and by the corroborating tropical atmospheric response.
The latest weekly Niño indices were +1.2°C in the Niño-4 region, +1.0°C in the Niño-3.4 region,
and +1.2°C and +2.3°C in the Niño-3 and Niño-1+2 regions, respectively
(Fig. 2)."
See
ENSO Diagnostic Discussion - 14 May 2015.

"There is an approximately 70% chance that El Niño will continue through Northern Hemisphere summer 2015,
and a greater than 60% chance it will last through autumn."
"By the end of March 2015,
weak El Niño conditions were reflected by above-average sea surface temperatures (SST) across the equatorial Pacific
(Fig. 1),
and by the expected tropical atmospheric response.
The latest weekly Niño indices were +1.1°C in the Niño-4 region, +0.7°C in the Niño-3.4 region,
and +0.6°C and +1.4°C in the Niño-3 and Niño-1+2 regions, respectively
(Fig. 2)."
See
ENSO Diagnostic Discussion - 9 April 2015.

"There is an approximately 50-60% chance that El Niño conditions will continue through Northern Hemisphere summer 2015."
"During February 2015,
El Niño conditions were observed as the above-average sea surface temperatures (SST) across the western and central equatorial Pacific
(Fig. 1)
became weakly coupled to the tropical atmosphere.
The latest weekly Niño indices were +0.6°C in the Niño-3.4 region and +1.2°C in the Niño-4 region,
and near zero in the Niño-3 and Niño-1+2 regions
(Fig. 2)."
See
ENSO Diagnostic Discussion - 5 March 2015.

"There is an approximately 50-60% chance of El Niño within the late Northern Hemisphere winter and early spring,
with ENSO-neutral slightly favored thereafter."
"Equatorial sea surface temperatures (SST) remained above average in the western and central Pacific during January 2015
and cooled across the eastern Pacific
(Fig. 1).
Accordingly, the latest weekly Niño indices were +0.5°C in the Niño-3.4 region and +0.9°C in the Niño-4 region,
and closer to zero in the Niño-3 and Niño-1+2 regions
(Fig. 2)."
See
ENSO Diagnostic Discussion - 5 February 2015.

"La Niña events are a vital portion of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) coupled ocean-atmosphere process.
La Niña events recharge the heat released from the tropical Pacific during the El Niño."

"Note that most La Niña events do not fully recharge the heat released by the El Niño events."

"Contrary to the beliefs of anthropogenic warming proponents
the 1997/98 El Niño was NOT fueled by a long-term accumulation of heat from manmade greenhouse gases.
The 1997/98 El Niño was strong enough to temporarily raise Global Lower Troposphere Temperature anomalies ~0.7° C."

"The La Niña event of 1973/74/75/76 provided the tropical Pacific Ocean Heat Content
necessary for the increase in strength and frequency of El Niño events from 1976 to 1995.
The 1995/96 La Niña furnished the Ocean Heat Content that served as fuel for the 1997/98 El Niño.
And the 1998/99/00/01 La Niña recharged the tropical Pacific Ocean Heat Content after the 1997/98 El Niño,
returning it to the new higher level established by the La Niña of 1995/96."

"Global SST anomalies rose and fell over the past 100 years in response to the dominant ENSO phase;
that is, Global SST anomalies rose over multidecadal periods when and because El Niño events prevailed
and they fell over multidecadal periods when and because La Niña events dominated."

"The oceans outside of the central and eastern tropical Pacific integrate the impacts of ENSO,
and it would only require the oceans to accumulate 6% of the annual ENSO signal
in order to explain most of the rise in global SST anomalies since 1910."

[The easiest image to interpret is the "Visible/Infrared Spectrum (Geo-Color)"]

The images in the Visible spectrum are the closest to what we see with our own eyes, binoculars and telescopes.
The images in the Infrared spectrum reveal heavier cloud cover, with condensation.
The images in the Water Vapor spectrum reveal up to thin cloud cover and transparency (sky magnitude).

Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES):
GOES-8 (in the GOES East position) was a geostationary satellite, at some 35,800 Km of altitude, in Lat. 0°, Long. 75° W.
At his height, the orbital period of the satellite equals the rotational period of the Earth.
It was launched in April 13, 1994 and stopped operating in May 5, 2004.
In April 1, 2004 it was substituted by GOES-12, with a similar orbit but with higher resolution sensors
that was launched in July 2001.
The GOES-13 satellite,
launched into space in 2006 and was responsible for tracking weather systems across the eastern United States
while the GOES West satellite monitored the country's western regions.
GOES-14 launched in 2009 and was placed in a storage orbit to serve as an in-space spare.
After September 23 '12 the GOES-13 satellite experienced problems with data from the imager and sounder instruments for several days,
the GOES-14 satellite has been activated and has replaced GOES-13 as the NOAA operational GOES East satellite.
GOES-14 will serve as GOES East until the GOES-13 satellite's malfunction can be repaired.
The GOES-14 satellite, currently located above the equator at 105 degrees of longitude, can not cover the extreme eastern Atlantic.
GOES-13 resumed GOES East services at 1445z on October 18, 2012.

In the early hours of May 22, 2013, GOES-13 suffered a loss of its ability to properly track the stars
- the system that keeps its sensors pointed towards Earth.
While engineers began working on the situation,
NOAA quickly switched GOES-15 into a non-standard mode of capturing full hemisphere images every 30 minutes
- the typical frequency that GOES-13 collects data.
Changes to the images and movies on this page will reflect GOES-15 coverage
until the morning of May 23 when GOES-14 is expected to be online and ready to assume the duties of GOES East.

GOES-14 is providing GOES-East coverage.
GOES-14 is stationary at 105 degrees West with no current plans to drift east.
GOES-13 will remain in storage mode while the anomaly is being investigated.
There is no estimate on return to operations at this time. [June 4, 2013]
More information: http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/PS/SATS/messages.html.

The planned GOES-13 return to GOES-East operations scheduled for today, June 6, 2013 at 1534 UTC,
has been POSTPONED due to a Critical Weather Day and Tropical Storm Andrea.
The transition will be rescheduled for a date yet to be determined, but no sooner than Monday, June 10, 2013.
More information: http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/PS/SATS/messages.html.

GOES-13 has successfully returned to full operational service as GOES-East at 1545 UTC today [June 10, 2013].
All operations are nominal. Operational level 2 processing and distribution of GOES-13 resumed at that time.
More information: http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/PS/SATS/messages.html.

"Much as your eye does,
visible images record visible light from the Sun that is reflected by cloud tops, land surfaces, ocean surfaces, and snow/ice surfaces."

"Cloud tops, land surfaces, ocean surfaces, and snow/ice surfaces reflect some of the visible light that strikes them, but they emit mostly IR radiation.
Wavelengths of this emitted IR radiation that lie in a portion of the electromagnetic spectrum called the atmospheric window
pass unaffected through the atmosphere to the satellite, which records them in ordinary infrared (IR) images."

"Note that visible and ordinary IR images tell us little about air itself, since both kinds of image record wavelengths to which air is transparent.
However, water vapor, carbon dioxide, and other gases in the atmosphere both absorb and emit IR radiation
with wavelengths lying outside of the atmospheric window.
Images that record infrared radiation emitted by water vapor, called water vapor images
and images that record infrared radiation emitted by other gases, provide information about state of the atmosphere."

"Weather satellites record the "brightness" or intensity of the visible and infrared radiation coming from different parts of the Earth or atmosphere.
Black-and-white satellite images display different intensities of radiation in different shades of gray."

"On IR images, since our eyes can't see infrared radiation of any intensity,
we have to decide arbitrarily how to translate different intensities into different shades of gray on a black and white image
(or different colors on a color-enhanced IR image).
By convention, we usually translate low intensities of infrared emission to lighter shades of gray,
and greater intensities of infrared emission to darker shades of gray.
Since infrared emission intensity tells us about temperature (the higher the emission intensity the higher the temperature),
the different shades of gray (or different colors) therefore tell us about differences in temperature."

The Global Forecast System (GFS) - Global Spectral Model (GSM):
The
Global Forecast System (GFS)
is a weather forecast model produced by the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP).
The entire globe is covered by the GFS at a base horizontal resolution of 18 miles (28 kilometers) between grid points,
which is used by the operational forecasters who predict weather out to 16 days in the future.
Horizontal resolution drops to 44 miles (70 kilometers) between grid points for forecasts between one week and two weeks.

An integrated forecasting and data assimilation system has been developed
with a view to meeting all of the current and foreseeable operational weather-forecasting needs of Canada for the coming years.
The model's name GEM stands for Global Environmental Multiscale model.

The model is global so that the long waves are handled properly for both data assimilation and extended-range forecasting.
The model has a variable-resolution capability such that it is possible to use either a uniform-resolution latitude/longitude mesh,
or a variable-resolution one that uses a rotated-coordinate system with a high-resolution sub-domain
that can be located over any portion of the globe.
Outside this area, the grid spacing smoothly increases to reach its maximum value at the antipodes.

The main effects of the Moon on the Earth are the tides, caused by their gravitational attraction.
Based on its mass, the Sun's gravitational attraction to the Earth is more than 177 times greater than that of the Moon to the Earth,
but because the Sun is 390 times further from the Earth than is the Moon,
the Sun's tide-generating force is about half that of the Moon.
See The Tides ("RGO Leaflets", in ARVAL)
See Inconstant Moon (John Walker, Fourmilab)

If the Earth were a perfect sphere without large continents,
all areas on the planet would experience two equally proportioned high and low tides every lunar day.
The large continents on the planet, however, block the westward passage of the tidal bulges as the Earth rotates.
Unable to move freely around the globe, these tides establish complex patterns within each ocean basin
that often differ greatly from tidal patterns of adjacent ocean basins or other regions of the same ocean basin.

Three basic tidal patterns occur along the Earth's major shorelines.
In general, most areas have two high tides and two low tides each day.
When the two highs and the two lows are about the same height, the pattern is called a semi-daily or semidiurnal tide.
If the high and low tides differ in height, the pattern is called a mixed semidiurnal tide.

Some areas, such as the Gulf of Mexico, have only one high and one low tide each day.
This is called a diurnal tide.
The U.S. West Coast and the Caribbean Sea tend to have mixed semidiurnal tides,
whereas a semidiurnal pattern is more typical of the East Coast.

"The mean sea level trend is 2.39 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.43 mm/yr
based on monthly mean sea level data from 1931 to 1981 which is equivalent to a change of 0.78 feet in 100 years."
(0.3 meters = 1 foot)

"The mean sea level trend is 2.33 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence interval of +/- 0.15 mm/yr
based on monthly mean sea level data from 1913 to 2014 which is equivalent to a change of 0.77 feet in 100 years."
(0.3 meters = 1 foot)

Cyclone:
An area of low atmospheric pressure that has a closed circulation.
Cyclones (or more commonly called "low pressure areas")
rotate counter-clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.
They usually bring about clouds and precipitation.
They originate over warm waters in an area of low atmospheric pressure and light winds that start turning counterclockwise.

Hurricane:
A warm-core tropical cyclone in which the maximum sustained surface wind (using the U.S. 1-minute average)
is 64 kt (74 mph or 119 kph) or more.
The term hurricane is used for Northern Hemisphere cyclones east of the International Dateline to the Greenwich Meridian.
It has a diameter of 250 to 500 miles and a cyclonic circulation typically extending to near 50,000 feet.
It is called a Typhoon in the western Pacific north of the Equator and west of the International Dateline,
a Cyclone in the Indian Ocean, and Baguio in the Philippines area.
(Surface winds are typically measured at an elevation of 10 meters)

Hurricane Season:
The portion of the year having a relatively high incidence of hurricanes.
The hurricane season in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico runs from June 1 to November 30.
The hurricane season in the Eastern Pacific basin runs from May 15 to November 30.
The hurricane season in the Central Pacific basin runs from June 1 to November 30.

The 2015 Atlantic hurricane season had slightly more activity than predicted in our seasonal outlooks
although we did correctly predict a somewhat below-average season.
Strong vertical wind shear driven by a strong El Niño was the primary reason why below-average activity was experienced.
Overall ACE activity in 2015 was approximately 65% of the 1981-2010 median.

The 2015 hurricane season was relatively quiet.
The season was characterized by slightly below-average numbers of named storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes.
This year's seasonal forecast slightly under-estimated Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) and Net Tropical Cyclone (NTC) activity levels.
Notably, nearly half of this season's ACE was generated by just one storm (Joaquin).

Integrated measures such as Net Tropical Cyclone (NTC) activity and Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) were at below-average levels.
The primary inhibitor to TC formation this year was very strong vertical wind shear,
especially in the central tropical Atlantic and Caribbean.
Several TCs formed in the eastern Atlantic, only to be sheared apart as they approached the Lesser Antilles.

There were 4 hurricanes, 92% of the 1981-2010 median (6.5)
There were 11 named storms, 67% of the 1981-2010 median (12.0)
There were 46.25 named storm days, 58% of the 1981-2010 median (60.1)
There were 11.50 hurricane days, 81% of the 1981-2010 median (21.3)
There were 2 major (Category 3-4-5) hurricanes, 100% of the 1981-2010 median (2.0)
There were 4 major hurricane days, 90% of the 1981-2010 median (3.9)
The Net Tropical Cyclone (NTC) activity was 82, 79% of the 1981-2010 median (103%)
The Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) was 62 units, 70% of the 1981-2010 median (92)

Thermohaline Circulation (THC) - A large-scale circulation in the Atlantic Ocean that is driven by fluctuations in salinity and temperature.
When the THC is stronger than normal, the AMO tends to be in its warm (or positive) phase, and more Atlantic hurricanes typically form.

As has been the case the past two years, the Atlantic was characterized by significant changes in SST over the course of 2015.
The SST pattern observed during June 2015 was much more indicative of a weak THC,
with cold anomalies observed in the tropical and North Atlantic and warm anomalies off of the US East Coast.

Information obtained through July 2015 indicates that the remainder of the 2015 Atlantic hurricane season will be much less active
than the average 1981-2010 season.
We estimate that the remainder of 2015 will have about 2 hurricanes (average is 5.5), 5 named storms (average is 10.5),
19.5 named storm days (average is 58), 8 hurricane days (average is 21.3), 1 major (Category 3-4-5) hurricane (average is 2.0)
and 0.5 major hurricane days (average is 3.9).
The probability of U.S. major hurricane landfall and Caribbean major hurricane activity for the remainder of the 2015 season
is estimated to be well below its long-period average.
We expect the remainder of the Atlantic basin hurricane season to accrue Net Tropical Cyclone (NTC) activity
approximately 35 percent of the seasonal average.
We have maintained our below-average seasonal forecast,
primarily due to a strong El Niño that is now firmly entrenched in the tropical Pacific.
In addition, vertical wind shear during July was at record high levels in the Caribbean.

This forecast is based on a newly-developed extended-range early August statistical prediction scheme developed over the previous 33 years.
Analog predictors were also considered.

Starting today and issued every two weeks following (e.g., August 4, August 18, September 1, etc.),
we will issue two-week forecasts for Atlantic TC activity during the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season from August-October.
A late-season forecast for the Caribbean basin will be issued on Thursday, October 1.

We continue to foresee a well below-average 2015 Atlantic hurricane season. A strong El Niño event now appears likely.
Conditions in the tropical Atlantic remain unfavorable for hurricane formation.
We continue to call for a below-average probability of United States and Caribbean major hurricane landfall.

Information obtained through May 2015
indicates that the 2015 Atlantic hurricane season will likely have much less activity than the median 1981-2010 season.
We estimate that 2015 will have only 3 hurricanes (median is 6.5), 8 named storms (median is 12.0), 30 named storm days (median is 60.1),
10 hurricane days (median is 21.3), 1 major (Category 3-4-5) hurricane (median is 2.0) and 0.5 major hurricane days (median is 3.9).
The probability of U.S. major hurricane landfall is estimated to be about 55 percent of the long-period average.
We expect Atlantic basin Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) and Net Tropical Cyclone (NTC) activity in 2015
to be approximately 45 percent of their long-term averages.

This forecast is based on a new extended-range early June statistical prediction scheme that was developed utilizing 29 years of past data.
Analog predictors are also utilized.
We anticipate a well below-average Atlantic basin hurricane season due to the combination of a high likelihood of a strong El Niño event
and unfavorable hurricane formation conditions in the tropical Atlantic.
Coastal residents are reminded that it only takes one hurricane making landfall to make it an active season for them,
and they need to prepare the same for every season, regardless of how much activity is predicted.

We will be issuing seasonal updates of our 2015 Atlantic basin hurricane forecasts on Wednesday 1 July and Monday August 3.
We will also be issuing two-week forecasts for Atlantic TC activity during the climatological peak of the season from August-October.
A verification and discussion of all 2015 forecasts will be issued in late November 2015.

We anticipate that the 2015 Atlantic basin hurricane season will be one of the least active seasons since the middle of the 20th century.
It appears quite likely that an El Niño of at least moderate strength will develop this summer and fall.
The tropical and subtropical Atlantic are also quite cool at present.
We anticipate a below-average probability for major hurricanes making landfall along the United States coastline and in the Caribbean.
Despite the forecast for below-average activity,
coastal residents are reminded that it only takes one hurricane making landfall to make it an active season for them.
They should prepare the same for every season, regardless of how much activity is predicted.

Information obtained through March 2015 indicates that the 2015 Atlantic hurricane season
will likely have much less activity than the median 1981-2010 season.
We estimate that 2015 will have only
3 hurricanes (median is 6.5),
7 named storms (median is 12.0),
30 named storm days (median is 60.1),
10 hurricane days (median is 21.3),
1 major (Category 3-4-5) hurricane (median is 2.0) and
0.5 major hurricane days (median is 3.9).
The probability of U.S. major hurricane landfall is estimated to be about 55 percent of the long-period average.
We expect Atlantic basin Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) and Net Tropical Cyclone (NTC) activity in 2015
to be approximately 45 percent of their long-term averages.

This forecast is based on an extended-range early April statistical prediction scheme that was developed utilizing 29 years of past data.
Analog predictors are also utilized.
We anticipate a below-average Atlantic basin hurricane season due
to the combination of a high likelihood of at least a moderate El Niño event and a relatively cool tropical Atlantic.
Coastal residents are reminded that it only takes one hurricane making landfall to make it an active season for them,
and they need to prepare the same for every season, regardless of how much activity is predicted.

We discontinued our early December quantitative hurricane forecast in 2012 and are now giving a more qualitative discussion
of the factors which will determine next year's Atlantic basin hurricane activity.
One of the big uncertainties for the 2015 Atlantic basin hurricane season
is if the currently developing weak El Niño will persist through next summer.

Our first quantitative forecast for 2015 will be issued on Thursday, April 9, 2015.

We are providing a qualitative discussion of features likely to impact the 2015 Atlantic basin hurricane season
rather than a specific numbers forecast.
This outlook for 2015 will give our assessment of the probability of four potential scenarios for Net Tropical Cyclone (NTC) activity.

We have developed a new way of assessing next year's activity in terms of two primary physical parameters:

the strength of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation (THC)

the phase of ENSO

We believe that we are still in an active era for Atlantic basin tropical cyclones since 1995
(despite the quiet seasons that occurred in 2013-2014),
and we expect that typical conditions associated with a positive Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation (AMO)
and strong thermohaline circulation (THC) will return in 2015.
One of the big challenges for 2015 is whether or not the currently developing weak El Niño will persist through the 2015 hurricane season.
While we saw a significant weakening of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) and thermohaline circulation (THC)
during the spring of 2014,
North Atlantic SST and sea level pressure patterns have since rebounded to conditions characteristic of an active era.
We anticipate that the 2015 Atlantic basin hurricane season will be primarily determined
by the strength of the THC/AMO and by the state of ENSO.

For the 2015 hurricane season, we anticipate four possible scenarios with the probability of each as indicated:

Thermohaline Circulation (THC) - A large-scale circulation in the Atlantic Ocean that is driven by fluctuations in salinity and temperature.
When the THC is stronger than normal, the AMO tends to be in its warm (or positive) phase, and more Atlantic hurricanes typically form.

The 2014 Atlantic hurricane season had close to the activity predicted in our seasonal outlooks.
We correctly predicted a somewhat below-average season.
Strong vertical wind shear and mid-level subsidence combined to suppress activity both in the tropical Atlantic and in the Caribbean.
Overall activity in 2014 was approximately 75% of the 1981-2010 median.

The 2014 hurricane season was relatively quiet.
The season was characterized by somewhat below-average named storm numbers,
with near-average numbers of both hurricanes and major hurricanes.
This year's seasonal forecast was one of our most skillful ones when verified against integrated measures
such as Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) and Net Tropical Cyclone (NTC) activity.

There were 6 hurricanes, 92% of the 1981-2010 median (6.5)
There were 8 named storms, 67% of the 1981-2010 median (12.0)
There were 35 named storm days, 58% of the 1981-2010 median (60.1)
There were 17.25 hurricane days, 81% of the 1981-2010 median (21.3)
There were 2 major (Category 3-4-5) hurricanes, 100% of the 1981-2010 median (2.0)
There were 3.5 major hurricane days, 90% of the 1981-2010 median (3.9)
The Net Tropical Cyclone (NTC) activity was 81, 79% of the 1981-2010 median (103%)
The Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) was 66 units, 70% of the 1981-2010 median (92)

Thermohaline Circulation (THC) - A large-scale circulation in the Atlantic Ocean that is driven by fluctuations in salinity and temperature.
When the THC is stronger than normal, the AMO tends to be in its warm (or positive) phase, and more Atlantic hurricanes typically form.

The 2013 Atlantic hurricane season was much quieter than predicted in our seasonal outlooks.
While many of the large-scale conditions typically associated with active seasons were present
(e.g., anomalously warm tropical Atlantic, absence of El Niño conditions, anomalously low tropical Atlantic sea level pressures),
very dry mid-level air combined with mid-level subsidence and stable lapse rates to significantly suppress the 2013 Atlantic hurricane season.
These unfavorable conditions were likely generated by a significant weakening of our proxy for the strength
of the Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation/Atlantic Thermohaline Circulation during the late spring into the early summer.
Overall activity in 2013 was approximately 30% of the 1981-2010 median.

There were 2 hurricanes (average is 5.5)
There were 13 named storms (average is 10.5)
There were 32.75 named storm days (average is 58)
There were 3.75 hurricane days (average is 21.3)
There were 0 major (Category 3-4-5) hurricanes (average is 2.0)
There were 0 major hurricane days (average is 3.9)
The Net Tropical Cyclone (NTC) activity was 42% of the seasonal average
The Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) was 30 units

"The 2011 hurricane season had above-average tropical cyclone activity but not to the levels that we predicted.
It was notable for having many weak tropical cyclones but only slightly above-average intense tropical cyclone activity."

"Atlantic basin hurricane activity in 2011 was well above-average for the number of weak TCs,
while more intense TC activity was at slightly above-average levels.
Integrated measures such as Net Tropical Cyclone (NTC) activity and Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) were at somewhat above-average levels.
This was likely due to a combination of anomalously warm tropical Atlantic sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and a La Niña event."

"No major hurricanes made US landfall in 2011.
The last major hurricane to make US landfall was Wilma (2005), so the US has now gone six years without a major hurricane landfall.
Since 1878, the US has never had a six-year period without a major hurricane landfall."
"No Category 5 hurricanes developed in 2011. This is the fourth consecutive year with no Category 5 hurricanes."
"Hurricane Irene became the first hurricane to make US landfall since Hurricane Ike (2008)."
"Hurricane Irene was the first system to make landfall at hurricane strength in New Jersey since 1903."

"The string of good luck has been even more remarkable for the Florida Peninsula and the East Coast.
From 1995-2011,
only four major hurricanes out of 64 (6%) that formed in the Atlantic basin have made landfall along the Florida Peninsula/East Coast."

"Atlantic basin hurricane activity in 2011 was well above-average for the number of weak TCs,
while more intense TC activity was at slightly above-average levels."

We estimated that the hurricane season of 2011 would be significantly more active than the average season for 1950-2000.
We estimated that the hurricane season of 2011 would have about 9 hurricanes [there were 7 in total] (average is 5.9),
16 named storms [there were 19 in total] (average is 9.6),
90.5 named storm days [there were 80 in total] (average is 49.1),
35 hurricane days [there were 25 in total] (average is 24.5),
5 major (Category 3-4-5) hurricanes [there was 3 in total] (average is 2.3)
and 10 major hurricane days [there were 4.5 in total] (average is 5.0).

The probability of U.S. major hurricane landfall was estimated to be about 140 percent of the long-period average.
We expected Atlantic basin Net Tropical Cyclone (NTC) activity in 2011
to be approximately 175 percent of the long-term average [it was 135%].
We had decreased our seasonal forecast slightly from early December,
due to anomalous warming in the eastern and central tropical Pacific and cooling in the tropical Atlantic."

"The 2010 hurricane season had activity at well above-average levels.
Our seasonal predictions were quite successful.
The United States was very fortunate to have not experienced any landfalling hurricanes this year."

"Atlantic basin hurricane activity in 2010 was quite high due to the combination of anomalously warm Atlantic basin sea surface temperatures
and a rapidly developing La Niña event.
These favorable cyclone-enhancing conditions led to favorable dynamic and thermodynamic conditions for storm formation and intensification.
Consequently, nineteen named storms, twelve hurricanes and five major hurricanes formed in 2010.
This activity was 198%, 203%, and 217% of the 1950-2000 average for named storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes, respectively."

"The 2009 hurricane season had activity at below-average levels.
Our June and August forecasts correctly predicted below-average hurricane activity due to the development of a moderate El Niño.
We consider this season's forecasts to have been successful."

"Activity in 2009 was reduced considerably due largely to the moderate El Niño event that developed.
This event generated significantly stronger-than-average vertical wind shear, especially in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.
Consequently, only nine named storms, three hurricanes and two major hurricanes formed in 2009.
This activity was 61%, 38%, and 51% of the 1995-2008 average activity for named storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes, respectively."

"We foresee slightly below-average activity for the 2009 Atlantic hurricane season.
We have reduced our seasonal forecast from our early April prediction.
We anticipate a slightly below-average probability of United States and Caribbean major hurricane landfall."

"Information obtained through May 2009 indicates that the 2009 Atlantic hurricane season
will be slightly less active than the average 1950-2000 season.
We estimate that 2009 will have about 5 hurricanes [there were 3] (average is 5.9),
11 named storms [there were 9] (average is 9.6),
50 named storm days [there were 27.25] (average is 49.1),
20 hurricane days [there were 11.25] (average is 24.5),
2 major (Category 3-4-5) hurricanes [there were 2] (average is 2.3) and
4 major hurricane days [there were 3.25] (average is 5.0).
The probability of U.S. major hurricane landfall and Caribbean major hurricane activity is estimated to be
slightly below the long-period average.
We expect Atlantic basin Net Tropical Cyclone (NTC)
activity in 2009 to be approximately 90 percent of the long-term average [it was 66%]."

"This forecast is based on an extended-range early June statistical prediction scheme that utilizes 58 years of past data.
Analog predictors are also utilized.
The influence of El Niño conditions is implicit in these predictor fields,
and therefore we do not utilize a specific ENSO forecast as a predictor."

"We expect current weak La Niña conditions to transition to neutral and perhaps weak El Niño conditions by this year's hurricane season.
If El Niño conditions develop for this year's hurricane season,
it would tend to increase levels of vertical wind shear and decrease levels of Atlantic hurricane activity.
Another reason for our forecast reduction is due to anomalous cooling of sea surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic.
Cooler waters are associated with dynamic and thermodynamic factors that are less conducive for an active Atlantic hurricane season."

"We continue to foresee an above-average Atlantic basin tropical cyclone season in 2008.
We anticipate an above-average probability of United States major hurricane landfall."

"Information obtained through May 2008 indicates that the 2008 Atlantic hurricane season
will be more active than the average 1950-2000 season.
We estimate that 2008 will have about 8 hurricanes [there were 8] (average is 5.9),
15 named storms [there were 16] (average is 9.6),
80 named storm days [there were 84.75] (average is 49.1),
40 hurricane days [there were 29.50] (average is 24.5),
4 intense (Category 3-4-5) hurricanes [there were 5] (average is 2.3) and
9 intense hurricane days [there were 8.50] (average is 5.0).
The probability of U.S. major hurricane landfall is estimated to be about 135 percent of the long-period average.
We expect Atlantic basin Net Tropical Cyclone (NTC) activity in 2008 to be approximately
160 percent of the long-term average [it was 164%].
We have kept our seasonal forecast the same as it was in early April.
The primary concern with our current seasonal forecast numbers
is the continued ocean surface warming in the eastern and central tropical Pacific.
Although it seems unlikely at this point, there is a possibility that an El Niño could develop this summer and fall."

"This forecast is based on a new extended-range early June statistical prediction scheme that utilizes 58 years of past data.
Analog predictors are also utilized.
The influences of El Niño conditions are implicit in these predictor fields,
and therefore we do not utilize a specific ENSO forecast as a predictor.
We expect neutral ENSO conditions to persist during the 2008 Atlantic basin hurricane season,
although there is a possibility that a weak El Niño could develop."

The Atlantic Hurricane Season is between June 1 and November 30.
Its maximum is between mid-August and end-October.
The middle of the season is near September 10.
On average, in a season there are 11 tropical storms and 6 hurricanes, 2 of them very strong.

The Atlantic, eastern and central Pacific hurricane seasons officially ended yesterday, and as predicted,
the Atlantic season stayed below normal with 11 named storms,
while the eastern and central Pacific were above normal with both regions shattering all-time records.

Overall, the Atlantic hurricane season produced 11 named storms, including four hurricanes (Danny, Fred, Joaquin and Kate),
two of which, Danny and Joaquin, became major hurricanes.
Although no hurricanes made landfall in the United States this year,
two tropical storms - Ana and Bill - struck the northeastern coast of South Carolina and Texas, respectively.
Ana caused minor wind damage, beach erosion and one direct death in North Carolina,
and Bill produced heavy rain and flooding while it moved across eastern Texas and Oklahoma.
Hurricane Joaquin is the first Category 4 hurricane since 1866 to impact the Bahamas during the month of October.

NOAA scientists credit El Niño as the leading climate factor influencing both the Atlantic and Pacific seasons this year.

NOAA's 2015 Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook indicates that a below-normal hurricane season is most likely this year.
The outlook calls for a 70% chance of a below-normal season, a 20% chance of a near-normal season,
and only a 10% chance of an above-normal season.

The main climate factor expected to suppress this hurricane season is El Niño,
which is now present and is expected to last through the hurricane season.
Many models predict this El Niño to further intensify as the season progresses.
The current El Niño is already affecting the wind and rainfall patterns across the equatorial Pacific Ocean.

Based on the current and expected conditions, combined with model forecasts,
we estimate a 70% probability for each of the following ranges of activity during the 2015 hurricane season:

NOAA: Slow Atlantic hurricane season coming to a close. November 25, 2013:

The 2013 Atlantic hurricane season, which officially ends on Saturday, Nov. 30,
had the fewest number of hurricanes since 1982,
thanks in large part to persistent, unfavorable atmospheric conditions over the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean Sea, and tropical Atlantic Ocean.
This year is expected to rank as the sixth-least-active Atlantic hurricane season since 1950,
in terms of the collective strength and duration of named storms and hurricanes.

Thirteen named storms formed in the Atlantic basin this year. Two, Ingrid and Humberto, became hurricanes, but neither became major hurricanes.
Although the number of named storms was above the average of 12,
the numbers of hurricanes and major hurricanes were well below their averages of six and three, respectively. Major hurricanes are categories 3 and above.

Busy 2012 hurricane season continues decades-long high activity era in the Atlantic:

"November 30 marks the end of the 2012 Atlantic Hurricane season,
one that produced 19 named storms, of which 10 became hurricanes and one became a major hurricane.
The number of named storms is well above the average of 12.
The number of hurricanes is also above the average of six, but the number of major hurricanes is below the average of three."
"Based on the combined number, intensity, and duration of all tropical storms and hurricanes, NOAA classifies the season as above-normal.
2012 was an active year, but not exceptionally so as there were 10 busier years in the last three decades."

"The 2011 Atlantic hurricane season officially ended Wednesday,
having produced a total of 19 tropical storms of which seven became hurricanes, including three major hurricanes.
This level of activity matched NOAA's predictions and continues the trend of active hurricane seasons that began in 1995."

"Irene was the lone hurricane to hit the United States in 2011, and the first one to do so since Ike struck southeast Texas in 2008.
Irene was also the most significant tropical cyclone to strike the Northeast since Hurricane Bob in 1991."

"As far as landfalling major hurricanes (Category 3, 4 or 5 with top winds of 111 mph and greater) are concerned, the lull continues.
2011 marks a record six straight years without one hitting the United States. The last one to do so was Wilma in 2005."

A "very active" hurricane season was expected for the Atlantic Basin this year
according to the seasonal outlook updated on August 5 '10 by NOAA's Climate Prediction Center
- a division of the National Weather Service (NWS).

"We estimate a 70% probability for each of the following ranges of activity this season:
14 to 20 Named Storms [there were 19] (top winds of 39 mph or higher), including:
8 to 12 Hurricanes [there were 12] (top winds of 74 mph or higher), of which:
4 to 6 could be Major Hurricanes [there were 5] (Category 3, 4 or 5; winds of at least 111 mph).
(these include Alex, Bonnie and Colin)"

"The outlook ranges exceed the seasonal average of 11 named storms, six hurricanes and two major hurricanes.
Expected factors supporting this outlook are:
- Upper atmospheric winds conducive for storms.
Wind shear, which can tear apart storms, will be weaker since El Niño in the eastern Pacific has dissipated.
Strong wind shear helped suppress storm development during the 2009 hurricane season.
- Warm Atlantic Ocean water.
Sea surface temperatures are expected to remain above average where storms often develop and move across the Atlantic.
Record warm temperatures - up to four degrees Fahrenheit above average - are now present in this region.
- High activity era continues.
Since 1995, the tropical multi-decadal signal has brought favorable ocean and atmospheric conditions in sync,
leading to more active hurricane seasons.
Eight of the last 15 seasons rank in the top ten for the most named storms with 2005 in first place with 28 named storms."

"NOAA's 2010 Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook called for an 90% chance of an above normal season.
The outlook indicates only a 10% chance of a near-normal season."

"NOAA scientists will continue to monitor evolving conditions in the tropics and issued an updated hurricane outlook in early August,
just prior to what is historically the peak period for hurricane activity."

[Note that the prediction by The Tropical Meteorology Project (Colorado State University)
falls near the central ranges of this NOAA outlook]

NOAA forecasted for 2009 a season with activity probably near or below the average:
From 7 to 11 tropical storms (there were 9), with 3 to 6 turning into hurricanes (there were 3),
of which 1 to 2 could be very strong (there were 2).
The great majority of these storms and hurricanes was in August, September and October '09.

The 2008 Atlantic Hurricane Season officially came to a close on Sunday, November 30,
marking the end of a season that produced a record number of consecutive storms to strike the United States
and ranks as one of the more active seasons in the 64 years since comprehensive records began.

NOAA forecasted for 2008 another season with activity probably over the average: From 12 to 16 tropical storms (there were 16),
with 6 to 9 turning into hurricanes (there were 8), of which 2 to 5 could be very strong (there were 5).
The great majority of these storms and hurricanes would be in August, September and October '08.

NOAA forecasted for 2007 another season with activity probably over the average: From 13 to 17 tropical storms (there were 9),
with 7 to 10 turning into hurricanes (there were 6), of which 3 to 5 could be very strong (there were 2).
The great majority of these storms and hurricanes would be in August, September and October '07 (there were from May to December).

NOAA forecasted for 2006 another season with activity probably over the average: From 12 to 15 tropical storms (there were 9),
with 7 to 9 turning into hurricanes (there were 5), of which 3 to 4 could be very strong (there were 2).
The great majority of these storms and hurricanes would be in August, September and October '06 (they were in August and September).

NOAA forecasted for 2005 another season with activity probably over the average: From 18 to 21 tropical storms (there were 28),
with 9 to 11 converting into hurricanes (there were 15), of which 5 to 7 could be very strong (there were 5).

The 2005 season is the most active in the records
and continued the cycle initiated in 1995 that will probably extend into coming years.

Last 4-decades of Global and Northern Hemisphere Accumulated Cyclone Energy: 24 month running sums.
Note that the year indicated represents the value of ACE through the previous 24-months for the Northern Hemisphere
(bottom line/gray boxes) and the entire global ACE (top line/blue boxes).
The area in between represents the Southern Hemisphere total ACE.
[The graphic above is from December 31, 2015]

The Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) index is the measure of total seasonal tropical storm activity used by NOAA.
The ACE is a wind energy index, defined as the sum of the squares of the maximum sustained surface wind speed (knots)
measured every six hours for all named storms while they are at least of tropical storm strength.

On June 2011:
"Since 2006, Northern Hemisphere and global tropical cyclone ACE [Accumulated Cyclone Energy]
has decreased dramatically to the lowest levels since the late 1970s."
"During the past 6-years since Hurricane Katrina,
global tropical cyclone frequency and energy have decreased dramatically, and are currently at near-historical record lows."

December 1, 2011: The official end of the North Atlantic hurricane season:

Total number of storms was exceptional (19) with 7 hurricanes and 3 major storms. Not so much outside of the Atlantic...

Statement concerning Irene made on August 27, 2011:
The mainstream media has wondered in many recent articles if "global warming" is making hurricanes stronger or perhaps made Irene stronger.
As Dr. Kerry Emanuel pointed out -- that question is irrelevant.
It is the number of intense hurricanes that actually make landfall that is societally important.
However, from a scientific point of view,
it is a good idea to recognize that the population of "major" global hurricanes has not increased since 1979.
Thinking of the Figure as a stock market ticker, there are always ups and downs, recessions and depressions in activity.
But, the overall trend is flat proving conclusively that there is NO "overall" global increase in hurricanes, minor or major.
Since natural variability such as El Nino and La Nina is the primary driver of global hurricane variability,
any discussion of "climate change" impacts on TCs is woefully incomplete without acknowledging the effects of ENSO on global TC activity.
The North Atlantic basin is seemingly special
-- in that the current "active-period" since about 1995 has not necessarily manifested itself elsewhere --
and scientists are still unsure of why.
Tropical cyclone and climate change science is far from settled,
and any conjecture about global warming impacts can be argued from both sides of the aisle in a civil manner without resorting to personal,
political attacks.

2010 is in the books:
Global Tropical Cyclone Accumulated Cyclone Energy [ACE] remains lowest in at least three decades,
and expected to decrease even further...
For the calendar year 2010, a total of 46 tropical cyclones of tropical storm force developed in the Northern Hemisphere,
the fewest since 1977.
Of those 46, 26 attained hurricane strength (> 64 knots) and 13 became major hurricanes (> 96 knots).
Even with the expected active 2010 North Atlantic hurricane season,
which accounts on average for about 1/5 of global annual hurricane output,
the rest of the global tropics has been historically quiet.
The Western North Pacific in 2010 had 8-Typhoons, the fewest in at least 65-years of records.
Closer to the US mainland,
the Eastern North Pacific off the coast of Mexico out to Hawaii uncorked a grand total of 8 tropical storms of which 3 became hurricanes,
the fewest number of hurricanes since at least 1970.
Global, Northern Hemisphere, and Southern Hemisphere Tropical Cyclone Accumulated Energy (ACE) remain at decades-low levels.
With the fantastic dearth of November and December global hurricane activity,
it is also observed that the frequency of global hurricanes has continued an inexorable plunge into into a double-dip recession status.
With 2010 being a globally "hot" year,
we will likely see the fewest number of global tropical cyclones observed in at least three-decades...

Have Atmospheric CO2 Increases Been Responsible for the Recent Large Upswing (since 1995)
in Atlantic Basin Major Hurricanes?

"The U.S. landfall of major hurricanes Dennis, Katrina, Rita and Wilma in 2005
and the four Southeast landfalling hurricanes of 2004 - Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne,
raised questions about the possible role that global warming played in those two unusually destructive seasons.
In addition, three category 2 hurricanes (Dolly, Gustav and Ike)
pummeled the Gulf Coast in 2008 causing considerable devastation.
Some researchers have tried to link the rising CO2 levels
with SST [Sea Surface Temperatures] increases during the late 20th century
and say that this has brought on higher levels of hurricane intensity."

"These speculations that hurricane intensity has increased have been given much media attention;
however, we believe that they are not valid, given current observational data."

"There has, however, been a large increase in Atlantic basin major hurricane activity since 1995
in comparison with the prior 15-year period of 1980-1994 (22 major hurricanes)
and the prior quarter-century period of 1970-1994 (38 major hurricanes).
It has been tempting for many who do not have a strong background in hurricane knowledge
to jump on this recent 15-year increase in major hurricane activity as strong evidence of a human influence on hurricanes.
It should be noted, however, that the last 15-year active major hurricane period of 1995-2009 (56 major hurricanes) has,
however, not been more active than the earlier 15-year period of 1950-1964 (57 major hurricanes)
when the Atlantic Ocean circulation conditions were similar to what has been observed in the last 15 years.
These conditions occurred even though atmospheric CO2 amounts were lower in the earlier period."

"Although global surface temperatures increased during the late 20th century,
there is no reliable data to indicate increased hurricane frequency or intensity
in any of the globe's other tropical cyclone basins since 1979.
Global Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE) shows significant year-to-year and decadal variability
over the past thirty years but no increasing trend.
Similarly, Klotzbach (2006) found no significant change in global tropical cyclone activity during the period from 1986-2005."

After some prolonged deliberation,
I have decided to withdraw from participating in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
I am withdrawing because I have come to view the part of the IPCC to which my expertise is relevant as having become politicized.
In addition, when I have raised my concerns to the IPCC leadership, their response was simply to dismiss my concerns."

....

"All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable,
long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones, either in the Atlantic or any other basin."

"Moreover, the evidence is quite strong and supported by the most recent credible studies
that any impact in the future from global warming upon hurricane will likely be quite small."

....

"It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda
that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming.
Given Dr. Trenberth's role as the IPCC's Lead Author responsible for preparing the text on hurricanes,
his public statements so far outside of current scientific understanding
led me to concern that it would be very difficult for the IPCC process to proceed objectively
with regards to the assessment on hurricane activity."

....

Sincerely, Chris Landsea

Tornadoes:

Severe Weather 101: Tornadoes:

"A tornado is a narrow, violently rotating column of air that extends from the base of a thunderstorm to the ground.
Because wind is invisible, it is hard to see a tornado unless it forms a condensation funnel made up of water droplets, dust and debris.
Tornadoes are the most violent of all atmospheric storms."

"One of the main difficulties with tornado records is that a tornado, or evidence of a tornado, must have been observed.
Unlike rainfall or temperature, which may be measured by a fixed instrument, tornadoes are short-lived and very unpredictable.
If a tornado occurs in a place with few or no people, it is not likely to be documented.
Many significant tornadoes may not make it into the historical record
since Tornado Alley was very sparsely populated during the 20th century."

"Because a tornado is part of a severe convective storm, and these storms occur all over the Earth,
tornadoes are not limited to any specific geographic location.
In fact, tornadoes have been documented in every state of the United States,
and on every continent, with the exception of Antarctica (even there, a tornado occurrence is not impossible).
In fact, wherever the atmospheric conditions are exactly right, the occurrence of a tornadic storm is possible."

"However, some parts of the world are much more prone to tornadoes than others.
Globally, the middle latitudes, between about 30° and 50° North or South, provide the most favorable environment for tornadogenesis.
This is the region where cold, polar air meets against warmer, subtropical air,
often generating convective precipitation along the collision boundaries.
In addition, air in the mid-latitudes often flows at different speeds and directions at different levels of the troposphere,
facilitating the development of rotation within a storm cell.
Interestingly, the places that receive the most frequent tornadoes are also considered the most fertile agricultural zones of the world.
This is due in part to the high number of convective storms delivering needed precipitation to these areas.
Simply as a result of the large number of convective storms and the favorable environment,
the odds are increased that some of these storms will produce tornadoes."

"In the United States, there are two regions with a disproportionately high frequency of tornadoes.
Florida is one and "Tornado Alley" in the south-central U.S. is the other.
Florida has numerous tornadoes simply due to the high frequency of almost daily thunderstorms.
In addition, several tropical storms or hurricanes often impact the Florida peninsula each year.
When these tropical systems move ashore, the embedded convective storms in the rain bands often produce tornadoes.
However, despite the violent nature of a tropical storm or hurricane,
the tornadoes they spawn (some as water spouts) tend to be weaker than those produced by non-tropical thunderstorms."

"In addition, tornadoes occur throughout the year.
Because a tornado may occur at any time of the day or year somewhere in the U.S.,
there really is no national tornado "season" (as there is with Atlantic hurricanes).
Instead, each region may experience increased tornadic potential at different times of the year."

"With increased national Doppler radar coverage, increasing population, and greater attention to tornado reporting,
there has been an increase in the number of tornado reports over the past several decades.
This can create a misleading appearance of an increasing trend in tornado frequency."
"There has been little trend in the frequency of the stronger tornadoes over the past 55 years."

"Because most tornadoes are related to the strength of a thunderstorm,
and thunderstorms normally gain most of their energy from solar heating and latent heat released by the condensation of water vapor,
it is not surprising that most tornadoes occur in the afternoon and evening hours, with a minimum frequency around dawn."

Annual totals of U.S. tornadoes from NWS Local Storm Reports:2011: 1,897.
2012: 1,116.
2013: 943.
2014: 1,055.
2015: 1,257.
U.S. Annual Averages (till 2014): Last 30 years: 1,141. Last 20 years: 1,239. Last 10 years 1,201.
Annual Average Number of Tornadoes by State:
Florida: Last 30 years average: 59. Last 20 years average: 60. Last 10 years average: 41.

Then there is the cycle of activity of the Sun itself, some 11 years, but not very constant in length or intensity.
Some of the effects of the Solar activity on the Earth's atmosphere are now just beginning to be studied.
The reconstructions of ancient climates reveal a close correlation between Solar activity and temperatures on Earth.
The correlation between Solar activity plus oceanic heat transport and temperatures
is much more closer than the correlation between the abundance of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and temperatures.

There is "a pronounced influence of solar activity on global climatic processes" related to "temperature,
precipitation and atmospheric and oceanic circulation".
"The temporal synchrony between the Maunder, Sporer, and Wolf minima and the expansion of Alpine glaciers
further points to a climate response to the deep solar minima".
From Solar Forcing of Multiple Climatic Parameters
(Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso. CO2 Science. June 4, 2008)

"Scientists have only recently come to suspect that cosmic rays have an important influence on Earth's climate.
Cosmic rays are highly energetic charged particles that originate from various sources in outer space."
"Scientists have found a link between cosmic ray levels and thunderstorms.
There is also a positive correlation between cosmic ray flux (CRF) and low-altitude cloud formation."
"Ions created in the troposphere by cosmic rays could provide a mechanism for cloud formation."
"The influence of galactic cosmic ray modulation is strongest on low-level clouds."
"When the Sun is active, its magnetic field is stronger and as a result fewer global cosmic rays (GCR) arrive in the vicinity of Earth."
"The variations of the cosmic ray flux, as predicted from the galactic model and as observed from the iron meteorites,
are in sync with the occurrence of ice age epochs on Earth. The agreement is both in period and in phase."
"The inverse relationship between temperature and CRF is clear; when CRF rises, temperature falls, when CRF drops off, temperature climbs."
"The evidence of correlations between paleoclimate records and solar and cosmic ray activity indicators,
suggests that extraterrestrial phenomena are responsible for climatic variability on time scales ranging from days to millennia."
"The movement of the solar system in and out of the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy
is responsible for changes in the amount of cosmic rays impacting Earth's atmosphere."
"Cosmic Ray Flux variations explain more than two-thirds of the variance in the reconstructed temperature,
making CRF variability the dominant climate driver over geologic time scales."
"It has been known for some time that a 62±3 million-year cycle in fossil diversity has persisted over the past 542 million years."
"Recently, it has been proposed that the cycle is caused by modulation of CRF due to the solar system's vertical oscillation in the galaxy,
which has a period of around 64 million years."

Scientists studying sunspots for the past 2 decades have concluded
that the magnetic field that triggers their formation has been steadily declining.
If the current trend continues, by 2016 the sun's face may become spotless and remain that way for decades
- a phenomenon that in the 17th century coincided with a prolonged period of cooling on Earth.
The last solar minimum should have ended in 2010, but something peculiar has been happening.
Although solar minimums normally last about 16 months, Solar Cycle 23 stretched over 26 months - the longest in a century.
One reason, according to a paper submitted to the International Astronomical Union Symposium No. 273, an online colloquium,
Long-term Evolution of Sunspot Magnetic Fields
(Matthew Penn, William Livingston, 3 Sep. 2010), is that the magnetic field strength of sunspots appears to be waning.
The phenomenon has happened before.
Sunspots disappeared almost entirely between 1645 and 1715 during a period called the Maunder Minimum,
which coincided with decades of lower-than-normal temperatures in Europe nicknamed the Little Ice Age.
But Livingston cautions that the zero-sunspot prediction could be premature.
"It may not happen," he says. "Only the passage of time will tell whether the solar cycle will pick up."
See Say Goodbye to Sunspots?
(Phil Berardelli, AAAS ScienceNOW, 14 September 2010).
For a discussion, see
The sun is still in a slump - still not conforming to NOAA "consensus" forecasts
(Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That?, January 5, 2011).

For Solar Cycle 24, the first maximum number of Sunspots occurred in November 2011 (Ri=96.7).
A second, higher, peak in sunspot number occurred in February 2014 (Ri=102.3).

Daily and monthly international sunspot number Ri: last 13 years and forecasts

Daily sunspot number (yellow), monthly mean sunspot number (blue),
smoothed monthly sunspot number (red) for the last 13 years and 12-month ahead predictions of the monthly smoothed sunspot number:
SC method (red dots):
prediction method based on an interpolation of Waldmeier's standard curves; It is only based on the sunspot number series.
CM method (red dashes):
(from K. Denkmayr and P. Cugnon) combining a regression technique applied to the sunspot number series
with the aa geomagnetic index used as a precursor (improved predictions during the minimum phase between solar cycles).

The yearly averaged sunspot number for a period of 400 years (1610-2015)
The Maunder Minimum is shown during the second half of the 17th century
Solar Physics Group, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center [August 25, 2015]

"The Maunder Minimum:
Early records of sunspots indicate that the Sun went through a period of inactivity in the late 17th century.
Very few sunspots were seen on the Sun from about 1645 to 1715
(JPG image. August 25, 2015).
Although the observations were not as extensive as in later years,
the Sun was in fact well observed during this time and this lack of sunspots is well documented.
This period of solar inactivity also corresponds to a climatic period called the "Little Ice Age"
when rivers that are normally ice-free froze and snow fields remained year-round at lower altitudes.
There is evidence that the Sun has had similar periods of inactivity in the more distant past.
The connection between solar activity and terrestrial climate is an area of on-going research."

"The sunspot number (SSN) record (1610-present) is the primary time sequence of solar and solar-terrestrial physics,
with application to studies of the solar dynamo, space weather, and climate change.
Contrary to common perception, and despite its importance,
the international sunspot number (as well as the alternative widely-used group SSN) series is inhomogeneous and in need of calibration.
We trace the evolution of the sunspot record and show that significant discontinuities arose in ~1885
(resulting in a ~50% step in the group SSN) and again when Waldmeier took over from Brunner in 1945 (~20% step in Zürich SSN).
We follow Wolf and show how the daily range of geomagnetic activity can be used to maintain the sunspot calibration
and use this technique to obtain a revised, homogeneous, and single sunspot series from 1835-2011."

After the alarm caused by Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" in 2006,
these are my findings about the drivers of Earth's global climate.
Along the way, I learned about the "Greenhouse Theory" and how water vapor,
methane and carbon dioxide delay outgoing heat radiation to space. I also learned about how atmospheric convection cools the Earth.
I learned about global climate as a statistical construct.
I learned about the Sun and its cycles, and about how they correlate to climate changes in the past.
I learned about continental drift and the ice core drillings,
and how climate has always been changing from the beginnings of our planet, some 4,500 million years ago,
and has continued to change since the origins of carbon-based life, some 3,800 million years ago.
I learned about the Milankovitch cycles and the celestial origin of the profound long-range climate oscillations.
I also learned about the "El Niño" and "La Niña" transferring heat across the Pacific Ocean,
and their multidecadal effects on the global climate.
I studied the global temperature anomaly records and what they seemed to show,
and about their problems with the warm microclimates near cities and inside towns and airports, where most thermometers are located.
I studied the satellite-based global temperature records since 1979.
I have also learned about the United Nations Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change,
about how this political-scientific organization went about preparing their alarming Assessment Reports.
I have read theory on the effects of the Solar wind on the formation of clouds that
shade the Earth reflecting sunlight out to space.
I have learned that carbon dioxide is the gas of life for carbon-based creatures on Earth.

I try to present this science in this long section.
I am thankful to the many scientists that present their work with clarity.
I am thankful to the many professional and amateur "climate auditors" that will not
let the scientific method be trampled on by politics.

"Carbon restriction policies, to have any effect on climate, would require that the most extreme projections of dangerous climate actually be correct,
and would require massive reductions in the use of energy to be universally adopted.
There is little question that such reductions would have negative impacts on income, development, the environment, and food availability and cost
- especially for the poor. This would clearly be immoral."

"By contrast, the reasonable and moral policy would be to foster economic growth,
poverty reduction and well being in order that societies be better able to deal with climate change regardless of its origin.
Mitigation policies appear to have the opposite effect without significantly reducing the hypothetical risk of any changes in climate.
While reducing vulnerability to climate change is a worthy goal, blind support for mitigation measures - regardless of the invalidity of the claims
- constitutes what might be called bankrupt morality."

"In 1988 the scientist James Hansen of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
announced to Congress (USA) and the world, "Global warming has begun".
He went on to report that, at least to his satisfaction,
he had seen the "signal" in the climate noise and that the earth was destined for global warming,
perhaps in the form of a runaway greenhouse effect.
Hansen later revised his remarks,
but his statement remained the starting point of widespread concerns over global warming.
That same year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed as a joint program
of the United Nations Environmental Program, the World Meteorological Organization,
and the International Congress of Scientific Unions.
It has a mandate to prepare regular assessments of what is known and what should be done about anthropogenic climate change."

Retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. John S. Theon, the former supervisor of James Hansen,
has now publicly declared himself a skeptic and declared that Hansen "embarrassed NASA".
He violated NASA's official agency position on climate forecasting
("we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind's effect on it").
Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress.
[January 15, 2009]

"More than 1,000 dissenting scientists from around the globe have now challenged man-made global warming claims
made by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former Vice President Al Gore."

"49 former NASA scientists and astronauts sent a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden last week
admonishing the agency for it's role in advocating a high degree of certainty
that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change while neglecting empirical evidence that calls the theory into question."

Just how good are climate models at predicting regional patterns of climate change?
I had occasion to survey this literature as part of a recently completed research project on the subject.
The simple summary is that, with few exceptions, climate models not only fail to do better than random numbers,
in some cases they are actually worse.

"The way the problem is customarily presented to the public is seriously misleading.
The public is led to believe that the carbon dioxide problem has a single cause and a single consequence.
The single cause is fossil fuel burning, the single consequence is global warming.
In reality there are multiple causes and multiple consequences.
The atmospheric carbon dioxide that drives global warming is only the tail of the dog.
The dog that wags the tail is the global ecology: forests, farms and swamps, as well as power-stations, factories and automobiles.
And the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has other consequences that may be at least as important as global warming
- increasing crop yields and growth of forests, for example.
To handle the problem intelligently, we need to understand all the causes and all the consequences."

"The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics,
and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans.
They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests.
They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in."

"The dramatic and threatening environmental changes announced for the next decades
are the result of models whose main drive factor of climatic changes is the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Although taken as a premise, the hypothesis does not have verifiable consistence."

"CO2 changes are closely related to temperature.
Warmer seasons or triennial phases are followed by an atmosphere that is rich in CO2,
reflecting the gas solving or exsolving from water, and not photosynthesis activity."

"Monthly changes have no correspondence
as would be expected if the warming was an important absorption-radiation effect of the CO2 increase.
The anthropogenic wasting of fossil fuel CO2 to the atmosphere shows no relation with the temperature changes even in an annual basis.
The absence of immediate relation between CO2 and temperature is evidence that rising its mix ratio in the atmosphere
will not imply more absorption and time residence of energy over the Earth surface.
This is explained because band absorption is nearly all done with historic CO2 values.
Unlike CO2, water vapor in the atmosphere is rising in tune with temperature changes, even in a monthly scale.
The rising energy absorption of vapor is reducing the outcoming long wave radiation window and amplifying warming regionally
and in a different way around the globe."

"The main conclusion one arrives at the analysis is that CO2 has not a causal relation with global warming
and it is not powerful enough to cause the historical changes in temperature that were observed."

Man-made global warming has not been scientifically proven,
while significant reasons for considering this hypothesis as incorrect have been presented:

Committee of Geological Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences:

"The Earth's climate has predominantly been warmer than at present.
However, there has been some significant cooling that resulted in the development of extensive glaciations,
in some of which ice sheets even reached the tropics.
Therefore, any reliable forecasts of climate change, before discussion of prevention or neutralization,
should take into account evidence from the geological past when, obviously, neither humans nor industry affected the Earth."

"During the last 400 thousand years - still without anthropogenic greenhouse influence -
the content of carbon dioxide in the air, as indicated by ice cores from Antarctica,
was repeatedly 4 times at similar or even slightly higher level than at present."

"In the past millennium, after warm medieval ages, by the end of the 13th century
a cold period started and lasted up to the middle of the 19th century,
then gave pace to another warm period in which we are living now.
The phenomena observed today, specifically a temporary rise of global temperature,
just reflect a natural rhythm of climate change."

"Instrumental monitoring of climate parameters has been carried out for only slightly more than 200 years
and exclusively on some parts of the continents that constitute a small part of the Earth.
Several older measurement stations once set up in suburbs now appear, due to progressive urbanization,
in the town centers which results among other effects in increased values of the measured temperatures.
Profound examination of the oceans was initiated 40 years ago.
Reliable climatic models must not be based on such a short measurement data base.
Therefore, considerable restraint is desirable
if ascribing exclusive or predominant responsibility to man for increased emission of greenhouse gases.
The reality of such arbitrary statement on human influence has not been demonstrated."

"Research experience in the Earth sciences suggests that simple explanations of natural phenomena,
based on partial observations only and without consideration of numerous factors important for individual processes in a geosystem,
lead generally to unreasonable simplification and misleading conclusions."

Svante Arrhenius (Physicist/Chemist, Sweden, 1859-1927) proposed in 1896 a theory to account for the Earth's ice ages,
he was the first scientist to speculate that changes in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
could substantially alter the surface temperature of the Earth through a "greenhouse effect".

He suggested that the human emission of CO2 would be strong enough to prevent the world from entering a new ice age,
and that a warmer earth would be needed to feed the rapidly increasing population.
He was the first person to predict that emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels and other combustion processes
would cause global warming.

In 1896 Arrhenius estimated that a halving of CO2 would decrease temperatures by 4-5°C
and a doubling of CO2 would cause a temperature rise of 5-6°C.
In his 1906 publication Arrhenius adjusted this value down to 1.6°C (including water vapor feedback: 2.1°C).

Recent estimates from IPCC (2007) say this value (the Climate Sensitivity) is likely to be between 2 and 4.5°C.
But Sherwood Idso in 1998 calculated the Climate Sensitivity to be 0.4°C, and more recently Richard Lindzen at 0.5°C.
Roy Spencer calculated 1.3°C in 2011.

"The average value of the best estimate of the equilibrium climate sensitivity across all the new studies is about 2.0°C.
The average climate sensitivity of the climate models used by the IPCC to project future climate changes (and their impacts)
is about 3.4°C - some 70 percent higher than the recent studies indicate."

"Nic Lewis and Judith Curry just published a blockbuster paper that pegs the Earth's equilibrium climate sensitivity
- how much the Earth's average surface temperature is expected to rise in association with
a doubling of the atmosphere's carbon dioxide concentration - at 1.64°C (1.05°C to 4.05°C, 90% range),
a value that is nearly half of the number underpinning all of President Obama's executive actions under his Climate Action Plan."

According to the AR4 report, the "likely equilibrium range of sensitivity" was 2.0 to 4.5°C per CO2 doubling.
According to the newer AR5 report, it is 1.5 to 4.5°C, i.e., the likely equilibrium sensitivity is now known less accurately.
But they write: "This assessment reflects improved understanding".
How ridiculous can you be?

I think the real reason why there is no improvement in the understanding of climate sensitivity is the following.
If you have a theory which is correct, then as progressively more data comes in, the agreement becomes better.
Sure, occasionally some tweaks have to be made, but overall there is an improved agreement.
However, if the basic premises of a theory are wrong, then there is no improved agreement as more data is collected.
In fact, it is usually the opposite that takes place, the disagreement increases.
In other words, the above behavior reflects the fact that the IPCC and alike are captives of a wrong conception.

New Report: Climate Less Sensitive To CO2 Than Models Suggest [March 5, 2014]

Oversensitive: How The IPCC Hid The Good News On Global Warming

A new report published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation
shows that the best observational evidence indicates our climate is considerably less sensitive to greenhouse gases than climate models are estimating.

The clues for this and the relevant scientific papers are all referred to in the recently published
Fifth Assessment report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
However, this important conclusion was not drawn in the full IPCC report - it is only mentioned as a possibility -
and is ignored in the IPCC's Summary for Policymakers (SPM).

For over thirty years climate scientists have presented a range for climate sensitivity (ECS) that has hardly changed.
It was 1.5-4.5°C in 1979 and this range is still the same today in AR5.
The new report suggests that the inclusion of recent evidence, reflected in AR5,
justifies a lower observationally-based temperature range of 1.25-3.0°C, with a best estimate of 1.75°C, for a doubling of CO2.
By contrast, the climate models used for projections in AR5 indicate a range of 2-4.5°C, with an average of 3.2°C.

This is one of the key findings of the new report Oversensitive: how the IPCC hid the good news on global warming,
written by independent UK climate scientist Nic Lewis and Dutch science writer Marcel Crok.
Lewis and Crok were both expert reviewers of the IPCC report, and Lewis was an author of two relevant papers cited in it.

In recent years it has become possible to make good empirical estimates of climate sensitivity
from observational data such as temperature and ocean heat records.
These estimates, published in leading scientific journals,
point to climate sensitivity per doubling of CO2 most likely being under 2°C for long-term warming,
with a best estimate of only 1.3-1.4°C for warming over a seventy year period.

"The observational evidence strongly suggest that climate models display too much sensitivity to carbon dioxide concentrations
and in almost all cases exaggerate the likely path of global warming", says Nic Lewis.

These lower, observationally-based estimates for both long-term climate sensitivity and the seventy-year response suggest that
considerably less global warming and sea level rise is to be expected in the 21st century than most climate model projections currently imply.

"We estimate that on the IPCC's second highest emissions scenario warming would still be around the international target of 2°C in 2081-2100", Lewis says.

Professor Robert Williams Wood (1868-1955), an American physicist and inventor,
in his "Note on the Theory of the Greenhouse" concluded:

"Is it therefore necessary to pay attention to trapped radiation in deducing the temperature of a planet as affected by its atmosphere?
The solar rays penetrate the atmosphere, warm the ground which in turn warms the atmosphere by contact and by convection currents.
The heat received is thus stored up in the atmosphere, remaining there on account of the very low radiating power of a gas.
It seems to me very doubtful if the atmosphere is warmed to any great extent by absorbing the radiation from the ground,
even under the most favourable conditions."

"I do not pretend to have gone very deeply into the matter,
and publish this note merely to draw attention to the fact that
trapped radiation appears to play but a very small part in the actual cases with which we are familiar."

The "greenhouse effect" would be crucial to the survival of life on Earth,
because without it our present global average temperature of some 15°C (59°F) would be instead of some -18°C (-0.4°F).

"When global warming is discussed, the warming effect of greenhouse gases is obviously of prime interest.
But it is seldom if ever mentioned that about 50% of the surface warming influence of greenhouse gases
has been short-circuited by the cooling effects of weather."

"Even if water vapor feedback is positive,
an increase in the solar shading effect of clouds (negative cloud feedback) could more than overwhelm the positive water vapor feedback,
leading to little net warming."

"While it seems rather obvious intuitively that a warmer world will have more atmospheric water vapor,
and thus positive water vapor feedback, I've listed the first 5 reasons why this might not be the case."

"One of the oft-cited objections to the term 'greenhouse effect' is that it is a misnomer,
that a real greenhouse (you know, the kind you grow plants in) doesn't work by inhibiting infrared energy loss.
It is usually claimed that a real greenhouse works by inhibiting convective heat loss by trapping the sun-heated air inside."

"The convective heat loss by the greenhouse roof (200 W/m2, inferred as a residual)
is only 8 W/m2 less than if the greenhouse was not there (208 W/m2).
In contrast, the extra IR energy "input" (actually, reduced IR "loss") is twelve times as large (100 W/m2)
as the reduction in the convective loss (8 W/m2)."

"Of course, changing any of the assumed numbers will change the result.
But, assuming I haven't made a fundamental mistake,
I think you would find that the 'greenhouse effect' will consistently be larger than the convective inhibition effect."

"So, maybe the greenhouse effect really does work like a real greenhouse."

"Over the course of the past 2 decades,
I have analyzed a number of natural phenomena that reveal how Earth's near-surface air temperature responds
to surface radiative perturbations.
These studies all suggest that a 300 to 600 ppm doubling of the atmosphere's CO2 concentration
could raise the planet's mean surface air temperature by only about 0.4°C.
Even this modicum of warming may never be realized, however, for it could be negated by a number of planetary cooling forces
that are intensified by warmer temperatures and by the strengthening of biological processes that are enhanced
by the same rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration that drives the warming.
Several of these cooling forces have individually been estimated to be of equivalent magnitude, but of opposite sign,
to the typically predicted greenhouse effect of a doubling of the air's CO2 content,
which suggests to me that little net temperature change will ultimately result from the ongoing buildup of CO2 in Earth's atmosphere.
Consequently, I am skeptical of the predictions of significant CO2-induced global warming
that are being made by state-of-the-art climate models
and believe that much more work on a wide variety of research fronts will be required to properly resolve the issue."

"The climate of the Earth is profoundly affected by two competing processes:
the greenhouse effect, which acts to warm the lower atmosphere and cool the upper atmosphere,
and atmospheric convection (thermals, clouds, precipitation) which does just the opposite:
cools the lower atmosphere and warms the upper atmosphere."

"There would be no weather on Earth without the greenhouse effect."
"Since it is the convective overturning of the atmosphere that causes most of what we recognize as 'weather',
most weather activity on Earth would stop, too.
Atmospheric convective overturning is what causes clouds and rainfall.
In the tropics, it occurs in relatively small and strongly overturning thunderstorm-type weather systems.
At higher latitudes,
that convection occurs in much larger but more weakly overturning cloud and precipitation systems associated with low pressure areas."

"Why would this occur? Infrared absorbers like water vapor and carbon dioxide provide an additional heating mechanism for the atmosphere.
But at least as important is the fact that, since infrared absorbers are also infrared emitters,
the presence of greenhouse gases allow the atmosphere - not just the surface - to cool to outer space."

"As Dick Lindzen alluded to back in 1990, while everyone seems to understand that the greenhouse effect warms the Earth's surface,
few people are aware of the fact that weather processes greatly limit that warming.
And one very real possibility is
that the 1 deg. C direct warming effect of doubling our atmospheric CO2 concentration by late in this century
will be mitigated by the cooling effects of weather to a value closer to 0.5 deg. C or so (about 1 deg. F).
This is much less than is being predicted by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or by NASA's James Hansen,
who believe that weather changes will amplify, rather than reduce, that warming."

Increased levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) have helped boost green foliage across the world's arid regions over the past 30 years
through a process called CO2 fertilisation, according to CSIRO research.

Satellite data shows the per cent amount that foliage cover has changed around the world from 1982 to 2010.

In findings based on satellite observations, CSIRO, in collaboration with the Australian National University (ANU),
found that this CO2 fertilisation correlated with an 11 per cent increase in foliage cover from 1982-2010
across parts of the arid areas studied in Australia, North America, the Middle East and Africa,
according to CSIRO research scientist, Dr. Randall Donohue.

In Australia, our native vegetation is superbly adapted to surviving in arid environments and it consequently uses water very efficiently,
Dr. Donohue said. Australian vegetation seems quite sensitive to CO2 fertilisation.

The fertilisation effect occurs where elevated CO2 enables a leaf during photosynthesis,
the process by which green plants convert sunlight into sugar,
to extract more carbon from the air or lose less water to the air, or both.

While a CO2 effect on foliage response has long been speculated, until now it has been difficult to demonstrate, according to Dr. Donohue.

Our work was able to tease-out the CO2 fertilisation effect by using mathematical modelling
together with satellite data adjusted to take out the observed effects of other influences such as precipitation, air temperature,
the amount of light, and land-use changes.

If elevated CO2 causes the water use of individual leaves to drop,
plants in arid environments will respond by increasing their total numbers of leaves.
These changes in leaf cover can be detected by satellite,
particularly in deserts and savannas where the cover is less complete than in wet locations, according to Dr. Donohue.

From "Deserts 'greening' from rising CO2".
CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. Australia's national science agency. July 3, 2013.
At http://www.csiro.au/en/Portals/Media/Deserts-greening-from-rising-CO2.aspxThis page was removed from the CSIRO Website.

It's amazing that minuscule bacteria can cause life-threatening diseases and infections
- and miraculous that tiny doses of vaccines and antibiotics can safeguard us against these deadly scourges.
It is equally incredible that, at the planetary level, carbon dioxide is a miracle molecule for plants
- and the "gas of life" for most living creatures on Earth.

In units of volume, CO2's concentration is typically presented as 400 parts per million (400 ppm).
Translated, that's just 0.04% of Earth's atmosphere.
Even atmospheric argon is 23 times more abundant: 9,300 ppm.
Moreover, the 400 ppm in 2013 is 120 ppm more than the 280 ppm CO2 level of 1800.

Over the past two centuries, our planet finally began to emerge from the Little Ice Age
that had cooled the Earth and driven Viking settlers out of Greenland.
Warming oceans slowly released some of the CO2 stored in their waters.
Industrial Revolution factories and growing human populations burned more wood and fossil fuels, baked more bread, and brewed more beer,
adding still more CO2 to the atmosphere.
Much more of the miracle molecule came from volcanoes and sub-sea vents, forest fires, bio-fuels use, decaying plants and animals,
and "exhaust" from living, breathing animals and humans.

What a difference that extra 120 ppm has made for plants, and for animals and humans that depend on them.
The more CO2 there is in the atmosphere, the more it is absorbed by plants of every description - and the faster and better they grow,
even under adverse conditions like limited water, extremely hot air temperatures, or infestations of insects, weeds and other pests.
As trees, grasses, algae and crops grow more rapidly and become healthier and more robust,
animals and humans enjoy better nutrition on a planet that is greener and greener.

One of the worst things that could happen to our planet and its people, animals, and plants,
would be for CO2 levels to plunge back to levels last seen before the Industrial Revolution.
Decreasing CO2 levels would be especially problematical if Earth cools, in response to the Sun entering another "quiet phase",
as happened during the Little Ice Age.
If Earth cools again, growing seasons would shorten and arable cropland would decrease in the northern temperate zones.
We would then need every possible molecule of CO2 - just to keep agricultural production high enough to stave off mass human starvation ...
and save wildlife habitats from being plowed under to replace that lost cropland.

The era of chlorophyll dominance is referred to as the Great Oxidation.
This happened 2.5 billion years ago.
The ocean's dissolved iron rusted out [of the solution], producing our planet's iron ore deposits and releasing oxygen.
Chlorophyll is still the mechanism controlling the CO2 and O2 abundance.

All life forms basically originated by a photosynthesis process.
Chemically our hemoglobin and chlorophyll are quite similar, suggesting a common origin; this is supported by a common DNA code.

Whereas animals do not photosynthesize, their plant foods do.
Beef, chicken or fish feed off photosynthetic products.
It is mainly trace minerals that supplement [the] photo-source.

CO2 is literally the gas of life for all macro life forms we encounter.
The existence of extremophiles suggests very early non-solar energy sources.

Demonizing CO2 started with the plan for peaceful use of atomic energy.
The big dream in 1946 that was that atomic energy would be so cheap
that electricity would never again need to be metered.
The attribution of increased CO2 to fossil fuel burning was born then.

Atomic energy advocates wanted to save Earth from runaway Green House heating like [in] Venus.
A conservation ethic developed to conserve the finite petroleum for the future and
anti-pollution and anti-growth advocates added voices to the anti-CO2 theme.

All earthly macro life forms are photo-synthetically derived from CO2,
either directly or indirectly by chlorophyll that absorbs solar photons.
We are here not at the whim of a deity but by evolution of CO2 derivatives.

For the original and a discussion, see
The Gas of Life (Watts Up With That?, February 29, 2012)

The case of Venus:

The early climate of Venus is thought to have been controlled by a "runaway" atmospheric greenhouse effect that evaporated its oceans.
CO2 is now near 96.5% in its atmosphere (3.5% is nitrogen) and the surface of Venus receives little direct visible sunlight.
The Venusian atmosphere is full of dense, high clouds;
30 to 40 Km thick with bases at 30 or 35 Km of altitude.
Venusian climate is determined by its distance to the Sun (0.72 A.U.), its higher albedo and its atmospheric density.

Our atmosphere is not totally cloud-covered, as is Venus (albedo of 0.76);
globally, about 40% of the sky is always clear on Earth (albedo of 0.37).
Venus has an extremely high atmospheric pressure; 90 times greater than on Earth,
and the mean surface temperature on Venus is 465°C, 15°C on Earth.

"The IPCC assume CO2 concentration will rise exponentially from today's 385 parts per million to reach 730 to 1,020 ppm,
central estimate 836 ppm, by 2100."
"However, for seven years, CO2 concentration has been rising in a straight line towards just 570 ppm by 2100."

"Since 1980 global temperature has risen at only 2.7°F (1.5°C)/century, not 6°F (3.4°C) as IPCC predicts."

"Sea level rose just 8 inches (20 cm) in the 20th century, and has been rising since 1993 at a very modest 1 ft/century (30.5 cm/century)."

"The observed increase in global mean surface temperature over the industrial era
is less than 40% of that expected from observed increases in long-lived greenhouse gases together with
the best-estimate equilibrium climate sensitivity
given by the 2007 Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)."

"Based on current model results, we predict:
An average rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century of about 0.3°C per decade
(with an uncertainty range of 0.2-0.5°C per decade) assuming the IPCC Scenario A (Business-as-Usual) emissions of greenhouse gases."

"They predicted that if our emissions stayed the same, temperatures would rise by 0.3°C per decade,
and would be at the very least 0.2, and the most 0.5.
Even by the most generous rehash of the data, the highest rate they can find is 0.18°C per decade which is likely an overestimate,
and in any case, is below the very least estimate, despite the world's emissions of CO2 continuing ever higher."

IPCC 2012, Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX).
Summary for Policymakers. (drafted 18 November 2011, published 29 March 2012)

Part D. Future Climate Extremes, Impacts, and Disaster Losses

"Projected changes in climate extremes under different emissions scenarios
generally do not strongly diverge in the coming two to three decades,
but these signals are relatively small compared to natural climate variability over this time frame.
Even the sign of projected changes in some climate extremes over this time frame is uncertain."

"The IPCC plays a very influential role in the world, and it is imperative that its operations be unimpeachable.
Yet the oversight mechanisms of the IPCC simply do not appear to be adequate to assure this."

"This report reviews the IPCC procedures in detail and points out a number of weaknesses.
Principally, the IPCC Bureau has a great deal of arbitrary power over the content and conclusions of the assessment reports.
It faces little restraint in the review process due to weaknesses in the current rules.
And the government delegates who comprise the plenary Panel provide what appears to be largely passive and ineffective oversight."

Ross R. McKitrick is Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.
He is a Senior Fellow of the Fraser Institute and a member of the Academic Advisory Council of The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).

The Thermostat Hypothesis: How clouds and thunderstorms control the Earth's temperature

The Thunderstorm Thermostat Hypothesis is that tropical clouds and thunderstorms actively regulate the temperature of the earth.
This keeps the earth at an equilibrium temperature regardless of changes in the forcings.

Several kinds of evidence are presented to establish and elucidate the Thermostat Hypothesis
- historical temperature stability of the Earth, theoretical considerations, satellite photos,
and a description of the equilibrium mechanism.

The instrumental data is spatially and temporally inadequate.
Surface weather data is virtually non-existent and unevenly distributed for 85 percent of the world's surface.
There are virtually none for 70 percent of the oceans.
On the land, there is virtually no data for the 19 percent mountains, 20 percent desert, 20 percent boreal forest, 20 percent grasslands,
and 6 percent tropical rain forest.
In order to "fill-in", the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS),
made the ridiculous claim that a single station temperature was representative of a 1,200 km radius region.

Most surface stations are concentrated in eastern North America and Western Europe
and became the early evidence for human induced global warming.
IPCC advocates ignored, for a long time, the fact that these stations are most affected by the urban heat island effect (UHIE).

There is a consistent revision of the record to lower historic readings. This increases the gradient of supposed warming.
The other tell tale sign is that virtually all adjustments occur before the UAH satellite temperature record began in 1991.
20th century temperature trends begin with warming from 1900 to 1940, cooling from 1940 to 1980,
warming from 1980 to 1998 and a slight cooling trend to 2014.
If we accept overall warming from 1900, which is reasonable as the Earth emerges from the Little Ice Age (LIA),
then the highest temperatures will occur in the most recent record.
Identifying that 2014 was fractionally warmer than any other in the record does not change the trend of the "pause".
It does not enhance the CO2 causation claim.

Since 2009, NASA's Operation IceBridge has flown over Greenland more than one hundred times with a wide variety of instruments,
including radar, and generated vast quantities of data, adding to the work from many other missions.
This has allowed researchers to generate a three dimensional map depicting the age of the ice throughout the Greenland Ice sheet.

This 3D age map shows that three distinct periods of climate are evident within the ice sheet: The Holocene, shown here in green.
The last ice age, shown in blue. And the Eemian, shown here in red.

The top layers from the Holocene Period, formed during the last 11.7 thousand years and are fairly flat and uniform,
though the thickness varies depending on how much snowfall occurred.

"Physical, mathematical and observational grounds are employed to show that
there is no physically meaningful global temperature for the Earth in the context of the issue of global warming.
While it is always possible to construct statistics for any given set of local temperature data,
an infinite range of such statistics is mathematically permissible
if physical principles provide no explicit basis for choosing among them.
Distinct and equally valid statistical rules can and do show opposite trends when applied to
the results of computations from physical models and real data in the atmosphere.
A given temperature field can be interpreted as both "warming" and "cooling" simultaneously,
making the concept of warming in the context of the issue of global warming physically ill-posed."

"There is no global temperature.
The reasons lie in the properties of the equation of state governing local thermodynamic equilibrium,
and the implications cannot be avoided by substituting statistics for physics."

The Berkeley Earth Land + Ocean Data
anomaly dataset shows little global average temperature increase since 1998.
It shows a warming from 1910 to 1940 of 0.45°C, then a pause to 1975, and a warming to 1998 of 0.55°C.
Note the upward steps caused by El Niño: The Pacific Climate Shift of 1976, the 1986/87/88 El Niño and the 1997/98 El Niño.
Then the 2009/10 El Niño and the 2014/15 strong El Niño.

Berkeley Earth Monthly Global Temperature Anomaly Index, 1850 to present.
Annual Average (black) with 95% uncertainty (grey) and Ten-Year Average (red).
[Berkeley Earth land values combined with interpolated HadSST ocean values]
[Above ice air temperatures used when and where sea ice is present]

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study has created a preliminary merged data set by combining 1.6 billion temperature reports
from 16 preexisting data archives.
Whenever possible, we have used raw data rather than previously homogenized or edited data.

The NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), formerly National Climatic Data Center (NCDC),
Annual Global Mean Surface Temperature Anomalies over Land & Ocean database
shows a 0.3°C cooling from 1880 to 1910, a 0.6°C warming to 1944, then a 0.4°C cooling to 1956.
Then it shows a 0.8°C warming from 1956 to 2005 and a 0.2°C cooling from 2005 to 2011.
Then a 0.25°C warming to 2015.
The warmest years shown are 1998, 2005, 2010 and 2014, all close to a 0.6°C anomaly. Then a 0.9°C peak anomaly in 2015.
The record minimum anomaly is close to -0.4°C in 1910.
Note the upward steps caused by El Niño: The Pacific Climate Shift of 1976, the 1986/87/88 El Niño and the 1997/98 El Niño.
Then the 2009/10 El Niño and the 2014/15 strong El Niño.

NCDC have introduced a new method for calculating state (but not national), temperatures in the USA.
The new method makes the past cooler, creating a false impression of present warming at the state level.
The national figures remain unaffected. This is because they were already being calculated under the new system,
creating a similar false impression.

Climatologists have long been aware of the poor state of global surface temperature records
and considerable effort has been put into adjusting the raw data to correct known errors and biases.

These adjustments are not insignificant.
For example it has been noted that in the temperature series prepared by NOAA for the USA,
the adjusted data exhibits a much larger warming trend than the raw data.

It has also been noted that over the years changes to the data have often tended to cool the early part of the record
and to warm more recent years, increasing the apparent warming trend.

Although the reasons for the adjustments that are made to the raw data are understood in broad terms,
for many of the global temperature series the details are obscure
and it has proved difficult for outsiders to determine whether they are valid and applied consistently.

For all these reasons, the global surface temperature records have been the subject of considerable and ongoing controversy.

In order to try to provide some clarity on the scientific issues,
the Global Warming Policy Foundation has invited a panel of experts to investigate and report on these controversies.

The panel features experts in physics, climatology and statistics and will be chaired by Professor Terence Kealey,
the former vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham.

The U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN)
is a high-quality moderate sized data set of monthly averaged maximum, minimum, and mean temperature
and total monthly precipitation developed to assist in the detection of regional climate change.
The USHCN is comprised of 1,221 high-quality stations from the U.S. Cooperative Observing Network within the 48 contiguous United States.

Currently all data adjustments in the USHCN are based on the use of metadata.
However station histories are often incomplete or changes that can cause a time series discontinuity,
such as replacing a broken thermometer with one that is calibrated differently, are not routinely entered into station history files.
Because of this we are developing another step in the processing that will apply a time series discontinuity adjustment scheme.
This methodology does not use station histories and identifies discontinuities in a station's time series
using a homogeneous reference series developed from surrounding stations.

The USHCN adjustment procedures are applied in stepwise fashion so that the effects from each adjustment have a cumulative effect.
The data set containing the final adjustment procedure (urbanization adjustments) also contains all of the previous adjustments.

The cumulative effect of all adjustments is approximately a one-half degree Fahrenheit [0.3°C]
warming in the annual time series over a 50-year period from the 1940's until the last decade of the century.

Note that these 0.3°C amount to half of the 0.6°C warming since 1940 in the NCDC temperature time series.
This should be valid for all of the global temperature time series that share data, adjustments and homogenization methods with NOAA-NCDC:
CRU, GISS, JMA and BEST.

The HadCRUT4 time series from the Met Office, the UK's National Weather Service,
shows the combined global land and marine surface annual temperature record from 1850 to 2014.
It shows a slight cooling from 2003 to 2013, and also a cooling of -0.1°C from 1940 to 1975,
with a minimum anomaly of some -0.5°C in 1910, after some -0.3°C of cooling from 1878.
Note the upward steps caused by El Niño: The Pacific Climate Shift of 1976, the 1986/87/88 El Niño and the 1997/98 El Niño.
Then the 2014/15 strong El Niño.
Note that 1998 is tied with 2005, 2010, and 2014 as the warmest year in this time series.
The accuracy with which we can measure the global average temperature of 2010 is around 0.1°C.
(See HadCRUT4 FAQ)

Global surface air temperature anomalies (-0.8 to +0.8°C) from 1850 to 2014 (1961-90 mean)
It shows an increment in average temperature from 1910 to 1941 of some 0.5°C
It also shows an increment in average temperature from 1975 to 2003 of some 0.6°C

Calculating the global mean as the mean of the northern and southern hemisphere averages
helps prevent the value becoming dominated by the Northern hemisphere, where there are more observations.

The red bars show the global annual average near surface temperature anomalies from 1850 to 2014.
The error bars show the 95% uncertainty range on the annual averages.
The thick blue line shows the annual values after smoothing with a 21 point binomial filter.
The dashed portion of the smoothed line indicates where it is influenced by the treatment of the end points.
The thin blue lines show the 95% uncertainty on the smoothed curve.

The HadCRUT4 time series from the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia (UK)
shows the combined global land and marine surface annual temperature record from 1850 to 2015.
It shows a 0.19°C warming since 1998, after warming some 0.6°C since 1975.
Note the upward steps caused by El Niño: The Pacific Climate Shift of 1976, the 1986/87/88 El Niño and the 1997/98 El Niño.
Then the 2014/15 strong El Niño.

Global surface air temperature anomalies (-0.6 to +0.8°C) from 1850 to 2015 (1961-90 mean)
It shows an increment in temperature from 1910 to 1941 of some 0.5°C,
an anomaly of +0.56°C in 2014 (equal warmest on record since 1998),
and a peak anomaly of +0.75°C in 2015 (warmest on record).
It also shows a cooling of -0.1°C from 1941 to 1975.

The value for 2014 [0.56°C], given uncertainties discussed in Morice et al. (2012), is not distinguishable from the years 2010 (0.555°C),
2005 (0.543°C) and 1998 (0.535°C).
From Info sheet #1
(February 2015, Dr. Phil Jones, Climatic Research Unit, .pdf)

The NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
GISS Surface Temperature Analysis
monthly anomaly dataset shows little temperature increase in their Global Land-Ocean Temperature Index five-year Running Mean since 1998.
It shows an increase of about 0.4°C from 1910 to 1940, a pause to 1970, and an increase of about 0.6°C from 1970 to 2002.
Note the upward steps caused by El Niño: The Pacific Climate Shift of 1976, the 1986/87/88 El Niño, and the 1997/98 El Niño.
Then the 2014/15 strong El Niño.

Due to the 0.1°C measurement uncertainty, the years 1998, 2005, 2010 and 2014 are not distinguishable in temperature.

The annual mean anomalies
Hadley Centre Central England Temperature (HadCET)
dataset shows a decline of some 0.5°C from 2003 to 2012 (red line, 10-year running mean).
2006 was the warmest year on record for the minimum HadCET database.
The mean, minimum and maximum datasets are updated monthly.
These daily and monthly temperatures
are representative of a roughly triangular area of the United Kingdom enclosed by Lancashire, London and Bristol.
The monthly series, which begins in 1659, is the longest available instrumental record of temperature in the world.
The daily series begins in 1772.

This paper is, as intended, a work in progress as a compilation of what's current and important
relative to the data sets used for formulating and implementing unprecedented policy decisions
seeking a radical transformation of our society and institutions.

Recent revelations from the Climategate whistleblower emails,
originating from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia followed by the candid admission by Phil Jones,
the director of the CRU in a BBC interview
that his "surface temperature data are in such disarray they probably cannot be verified or replicated"
certainly should raise questions about the quality of global data.

Just as the Medieval Warm Period was an obstacle to those trying to suggest that today's temperature is exceptional,
and the UN and its supporters tried to abolish it with the "hockey-stick" graph,
the warmer temperatures in the 1930s and 1940s were another inconvenient fact that needed to be "fixed".

In each of the databases, the land temperatures from that period were simply adjusted downward,
making it look as though the rate of warming in the 20th century was higher than it was,
and making it look as though today's temperatures were unprecedented in at least 150 years.

Climategate has sparked a flurry of examinations of the global datasets not only at CRU, NASA, and NOAA,
but in various countries throughout the world.
Though the Hadley Centre implied their data was in agreement with other datasets and was thus trustworthy,
the truth is that other data centers and the individual countries involved
were forced to work with degraded data and appear to be each involved in data manipulation.

Should you believe NOAA/NASA/HADLEY rankings for month and year? Definitively NO!
Climate change is real, there are cooling and warming periods that can be shown to correlate nicely with solar and ocean cycles.
You can trust in the data that shows there has been warming from 1979 to 1998, just as there was warming around 1920 to 1940.
But there has been cooling from 1940 to the late 1970s and since 2001.
It is the long term trend on which this cyclical pattern is superimposed that is exaggerated.

These factors all lead to significant uncertainty and a tendency for overestimation of century-scale temperature trends.
An obvious conclusion from all findings above and the case studies that follow
is that the global data bases are seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends.
And, consequently, such surface data should not be used for decision making.

U.S. Temperature trends show a spurious doubling due to NOAA station siting problems and post measurement adjustments:

An area and distance weighted analysis
of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends

"A reanalysis of U.S. surface station temperatures has been performed using the recently WMO-approved Siting Classification System
devised by METEO-France's Michel Leroy.
The new siting classification more accurately characterizes the quality of the location
in terms of monitoring long-term spatially representative surface temperature trends.
The new analysis demonstrates that reported 1979-2008 U.S. temperature trends are spuriously doubled,
with 92% of that over-estimation resulting from erroneous NOAA adjustments of well-sited stations upward."

"The new improved assessment, for the years 1979 to 2008,
yields a trend of +0.155°C per decade from the high quality sites,
a +0.248°C per decade trend for poorly sited locations,
and a trend of +0.309°C per decade after NOAA adjusts the data."
"This issue of station siting quality
is expected to be an issue with respect to the monitoring of land surface temperature
throughout the Global Historical Climate Network and in the BEST network."

"The new rating method employed finds that station siting does indeed have a significant effect on temperature trends."

Comparison - All Rated Stations in the Continental U.S.
What the compliant thermometers (Class 1&2) say: +.155°C/decade
What the non-compliant thermometers (Class 3,4,5) say: +.248°C/decade
What the NOAA final adjusted data says: +.309°C/decade

Class 1&2 (Compliant):
Heat sinks cover under 10% of area within a 30-meter radius of sensor,
under 1% of within 5 meters, and under 5% of an annulus from 5 to 10 meters.

Class 3 (Non-Compliant):
Heat sinks cover over 10% of area within a 30-meter radius but under 10% within 10 meters and under 5% within 5 meters.

Class 4 (Non-Compliant):
Heat sinks cover from 10% to 50% of area within a 10-meter radius of sensor but under 30% within 3 meters.

Class 5 (Non-Compliant):
Heat sinks cover over 50% or more area within a 10-meter radius of sensor or over 30% within 3 meters.

"Since 1979,
NOAA satellites have been carrying instruments which measure the natural microwave thermal emissions from oxygen in the atmosphere.
The intensity of the signals these microwave radiometers measure at different microwave frequencies
is directly proportional to the temperature of different, deep layers of the atmosphere.
Every month, John Christy and I update global temperature datasets that represent the piecing together of the temperature data
from a total of fourteen instruments flying on different satellites over the years."

"As of early 2011, our most stable instrument for this monitoring
was the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU-A) flying on NASA's Aqua satellite and providing data since late 2002."

"As of June 2013, the Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU-A) flying on NASA's Aqua satellite has been removed from the processing
due to spurious warming and replaced by the average of the NOAA-15, NOAA-18, NOAA-19, and Metop-A AMSUs."

"Version 6 of the UAH MSU/AMSU global satellite temperature dataset is by far the most extensive revision of the procedures and computer code
we have ever produced in over 25 years of global temperature monitoring.
The two most significant changes from an end-user perspective are
(1) a decrease in the global-average lower tropospheric (LT) temperature trend from +0.140 C/decade to +0.114 C/decade
(Dec. '78 through Mar. '15);
and (2) the geographic distribution of the LT trends, including higher spatial resolution."
"In the early part of the record, Version 6 has somewhat faster warming than Version 5.6,
but then the latter part of the record has reduced (or even eliminated) warming,
producing results closer to the behavior of the RSS satellite dataset.
This is partly due to our new diurnal drift adjustment, especially for the NOAA-15 satellite.
Even though our approach to that adjustment is empirical, it is interesting to see that it gives similar results to the RSS approach,
which is based upon climate model calculations of the diurnal cycle in temperature."
From
Version 6.0 of the UAH Temperature Dataset Released: New LT Trend = +0.11 C/decade
(Roy W. Spencer, John R. Christy, and William D. Braswell. April 28th, 2015)

"The graphic shown below represents the latest update; updates are usually made within the first week of every month."
"Contrary to some reports, the satellite measurements are not calibrated in any way with
the global surface-based thermometer records of temperature.
They instead use their own on-board precision redundant platinum resistance thermometers (PRTs)
calibrated to a laboratory reference standard before launch."

The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for December, 2015 is +0.44 deg. C,
up from the November, 2015 value of +0.33 deg. C.

This makes 2015 the third warmest year globally (+0.27 deg. C) in the satellite record (since 1979),
behind 1998 (+0.48 deg. C) and 2010 (+0.34 deg. C).
Since 2016 should be warmer than 2015 with the current El Niño,
there is a good chance 2016 will end up as a record warm year...it all depends upon how quickly El Niño wanes later in the year.

"UAH V5.5 Global Temp. Update for September 2012: +0.34 deg. C."
"As discussed in my post from yesterday, the spurious warming in Aqua AMSU channel 5
has resulted in the need for revisions to the UAH global lower tropospheric temperature (LT) product."
"Rather than issuing an early release of Version 6, which has been in the works for about a year now, we decided to do something simpler:
remove Aqua AMSU after a certain date, and replace it with the average of NOAA-15 and NOAA-18 AMSU data.
Even though the two NOAA satellites have experienced diurnal drifts in their orbits,
we have found that those drifts are in opposite directions and approximately cancel. (The drifts will be corrected for in Version 6.0)."
"The new interim dataset, Version 5.5, has a September, 2012 global lower tropospheric temperature anomaly of +0.34 deg. C."
See
UAH V5.5 Global Temp. Update for September, 2012: +0.34 deg. C
(October 5th, 2012)
(Roy Spencer, Ph. D., Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville - UAH)

For those tracking our
daily updates of global temperatures at the Discover website,
remember that only 2 "channels" can be trusted for comparing different years to each other,
both being the only ones posted there from NASA's AQUA satellite:
1) only ch05 [14,000 ft/4.4 Km/600 mb] data should be used for tracking tropospheric temperatures,
2) the global-average "sea surface" temperatures are from AMSR-E on AQUA, and should be accurate.
["Channels" 5 and 9 allow comparing against the 1979-1998 average]

The temperature trend for RSS MSU lower tropospheric global mean from 1979 to 2002 was 1.46°C per century.
The temperature trend for RSS MSU lower tropospheric global mean from 2002 to 2014.92 was -0.59°C per century.
Note that global warming stopped in 2002 for the REMSS record, after peaking in 1998.

London, 15 March: A new report written by Dr. David Whitehouse and published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation
concludes that there has been no statistically significant increase in annual global temperatures since 1997.

After reviewing the scientific literature
the report concludes that the standstill is an empirical fact and a reality that challenges current climate models.
During the time that the Earth's global temperature has remained static
the atmospheric composition of carbon dioxide has increased from 370 to 390 ppm.

"The standstill is a reality and is not the result of cherry-picking start and end points.
Its commencement can be seen clearly in the data, and it continues to this day", said Dr. David Whitehouse, the author of the new report.

The report shows that the temperature standstill has been a much discussed topic in peer-reviewed scientific literature for years,
but that this scientific debate has neither been followed by most of the media, nor acknowledged by climate campaigners,
scientific societies and prominent scientists.

The report also surveys how those few journalists who have looked at the issue have been reporting the standstill,
with many far too ready to dismiss it or lacking a sense of journalistic inquiry, preferring to report squabbles rather than the science.

"If the standstill continues for a few more years it will mean that no one who has just reached adulthood, or younger,
will have witnessed the Earth get warmer during their lifetime", said the report's author, Dr. David Whitehouse.

In his foreword, Lord Turnbull, former Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service, commented:

"Dr. Whitehouse is a man who deserves to be listened to.
He has consistently followed an approach of examining observations rather than projections of large scale computer models,
which are too often cited as 'evidence'.
He looks dispassionately at the data, trying to establish what message it tells us, rather than using it to confirm a pre-held view."

"I think any good scientist ought to be a skeptic.", Freeman Dyson said.

"I just think they don't understand the climate," he said of climatologists. "Their computer models are full of fudge factors."

"The models are extremely oversimplified," he said.
"They don't represent the clouds in detail at all. They simply use a fudge factor to represent the clouds."

"It's certainly true that carbon dioxide is good for vegetation," Dyson said.
"About 15 percent of agricultural yields are due to CO2 we put in the atmosphere.
From that point of view, it's a real plus to burn coal and oil."

E-mails leaked out of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) (University of East Anglia, UK)
on November 17, 2009, show scientists colluding to distort data to favor the man-made global warming hypothesis
and suppress opinion and scientific works opposing it.
Scientists from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia are leading authors and contributors of the
IPCC Assessment Reports on Climate Change
(Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, UNEP).

These distorted data are the "physical" basis for "Global Warming" and "Climate Change".

"The only reasonable explanation for the archive being in this state is that the FOI Officer at the University was practising due diligence.
The UEA was collecting data that couldn't be sheltered and they created FOIA2009.zip."
[FOI = Freedom Of Information]

"It is most likely that the FOI Officer at the University put it on an anonymous ftp server
or that it resided on a shared folder that many people had access to and some curious individual looked at it."

"Occam's razor
concludes that "the simplest explanation or strategy tends to be the best one".
The simplest explanation in this case is that someone at UEA found it and released it to the wild
and the release of FOIA2009.zip wasn't because of some hacker, but because of a leak from UEA by a person with scruples."

"This is one of the darkest periods in the history of science.
Those who love science, and all it stands for, will be pained by what they read below.
However, the crisis is here, and cannot be avoided."

From
The Climategate Emails
(Edited and annotated by John P. Costella, Ph.D. The Lavoisier Group, March 2010, .pdf)

Is the science concerning the current concerns about climate change sound?
Many people, starting with the members of the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee,
had hoped this question would be answered during the inquiry process,
and there is a frequent refrain in the media that the investigations affirmed the science.
But the reality is that none of the inquiries actually investigated the science.

"Early this morning, history repeated itself.
FOIA.org has produced an enormous zip file of 5,000 additional emails
similar to those released two years ago in November 2009 and coined 'Climategate'.
There are almost 1/4 million additional emails locked behind a password, which the organization does not plan on releasing at this time."

"This website is provided as a research resource for mining the recently leaked climate communications.
Every effort has been made to redact personal contact information such as email addresses and telephone numbers.
The redaction algorithms are currently tuned to be quite stringent, and they will inadvertently obfuscate other details as well.
We will continue to tune the software to improve the quality of the results."

"This database was assembled in a very short space of time,
and at present only provides the most rudimentary tools for exploring this vast trove of material.
We will be improving the quality of the search tools and adding further metadata to the database over the course of the next few weeks."

"This is a searchable service of both ClimateGate I and II emails.
All full emails, telephone numbers and passwords have been redacted (replaced with ???).
Note: you can still search by them if you know them, they just won't show in the results."

"If you're wondering why this is on an Eco site
it's because we are interested in fact led research and development that leads to a better future for all;
ClimateGate is very indicative that at the very core of climate research
the high standards that we all expected for such core research are not being upheld."

"Behind the scenes, I've been playing with a new neat tool for hunting hypocrisy, corruption, bias and unprofessional behaviour
and I'm pleased to announce it's ready to share with the world.
The kudos for this all belongs to, as usual, a skilled volunteer. Thanks to EcoGuy for turning his rapid-fire coding ability onto this."

"On the EcoWho site he has helpfully placed all of Climategate I and II together into a combined searchable database.
It's fast, easy to scan, it copes with tricky search requests and provides a link to the full email from the results page of the search."

Who Are You Going To Believe - The Government Climate Scientists or The Data?

We check the main predictions of the climate models against the best and latest data.
Fortunately the climate models got all their major predictions wrong.
Why? Every serious skeptical scientist has been consistently saying essentially the same thing for over 20 years,
yet most people have never heard the message - here it is, put simply enough for any lay reader willing to pay attention.

27 Feb. 2012, Dr. David M.W. Evans
Mathematician and engineer, with six university degrees including a PhD from Stanford University in electrical engineering.

Figure 1. Observed global average temperature evolution, 1951-2013, as compiled by the U.K's Hadley Center (black line),
and the average temperature change projected by a collection of climate models used in the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report
which have a climate sensitivity greater than 3.0°C (red line) and a collection of models with climate sensitivities less than 3.0°C (blue line)
(climate model data source: KNMI Climate Explorer).

Hundreds of millions of dollars that have gone into the expensive climate modelling enterprise
has all but destroyed governmental funding of research into natural sources of climate change.
For years the modelers have maintained that there is no such thing as natural climate change... yet they now, ironically,
have to invoke natural climate forces to explain why surface warming has essentially stopped in the last 15 years!

Agreement in early years between climate models and observations led modelers to believe their assumed forcings (mostly C02)
and sensitivity were correct ...

... but the "pause" in warming now suggests they neglected sources of natural warming,
used a model sensitivity that was too high (to make up the difference),
and now the models are too sensitive and thus predict too much warming.

The "pause" in global warming is becoming increasingly difficult for the climate establishment to ignore, which is a good thing.
They are now coming up with reasons why there has been a "pause"
(a term I dislike because it implies knowledge of future warming, which no one has), and spinning it as if it is bad news for us.

But when they assume that natural climate variations can cause a cooling influence,
they are also admitting there can be natural sources of warming.

A natural change in ocean circulation is the leading potential explanation for the pause.
Due to the huge temperature difference between surface waters and deep water,
any small change in ocean overturning can result in either warming or cooling of surface temperatures.
If the ocean was isothermal with depth, such a mechanism would not exist.

The point of this post is to remind people of what I have stated before:
to the extent that a change in ocean circulation has negated anthropogenic warming in the last 15+ years,
an opposite change likely enhanced warming during the 1970s to 1990s.

You can't have one without the other. Natural fluctuations in ocean vertical circulation are cyclical.
You can't attribute the recent warming hiatus to natural forcings
without also addressing the role of potential natural forcings in causing the previous warming period.
At best, it betrays a bias in reasoning; at worst, it is logically inconsistent.

Science is not based on models but on authentic measurements. Models must be based on science, not the other way around.

On Earth's atmosphere, CO2 is some 0.06% in volume; surely not enough to cause a catastrophyc greenhouse effect.
According to some global climatologists and the IPCC climate models,
there would be a strong positive feedback action on water vapor amplifying the CO2 effect to be much more potent,
but this theoretical effect has not been measured in practice. It might be very small or even negative.

Understanding that a trace amount of CO2 can not be a main cause of a catastrophyc atmospheric greenhouse effect
means we are more in control of the quality of the air.
We are more responsible for our planet regarding the atmospheric pollution we cause,
and pollution must be minimized for the water and the ground too, and extensive deforestation must cease.
CO2 is not a pollutant; It's the gas of life on Earth!